ATI Radeon X1600 external monitor help needed

Hi all...

A customer of ours has a problem cloning his desktop onto an external monitor. He uses a Toshiba notebook (sorry, not got the model number yet) with an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics chipset. I have installed the latest version of the Catalyst Control Center and drivers for that chipset and his OS (XP Pro) is also up to date.

The external monitor displays his desktop while in 'Clone' mode on the Catalyst Control Center but I can't change the resolution for it. It will only run at the same resolution as the internal notebook screen, which is 1280x800. Because of this, there is a black border around the image. If I change the display mode to 'Extend', I can change the external monitor's resolution and it runs at 1680x1050 which I believe is the native resolution (it's a VGA 19" widescreen).

When on 'Clone' mode, I tried to change the resolution/settings in XP's Display Properties but I still can't get it to clone the internal screen. If I untick the option to 'Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor' the external monitor goes blank. It doesn't seem to stop recieving a signal and the backlight stays on but it just won't display anything.

Does anyone know if this is a hardware limitation or if it's a driver issue? Thanks for any help.

 

If the same desktop is being displayed on both screens (clone mode), the resolution is limited to the highest common resolution to both screens (1280x800 in this case, because the internal monitor cannot display 1680x1050 which is higher than the number of pixels it has).

What are you trying to make happen?

 

Yeah, if the notebook is 1280x800 then you cannot have 1680x1050 on the monitor...but it should not black out the unused space...

Ive messed with this stuff before, but I cannot remember atm what the solution to doing it. Perhaps try to change the display on the "clone" a few times and it will make it full screen, but it will still be 1280x800.

 

In Catalyst Control Center, on the left hand column there is a tab called monitors, you have to select scaling options and make it stretch.

 

Thank you for the information.

The customer tried scaling it up but they didn't like the way it stretched the image and made it lose crispness, if you know what I mean. They use a TV to show graphical design work and it became too distorted when stretched so they will just have to put up with the borders and smaller image.

 

Great! Glad you guys figured it out!

Haha and I know what you mean when its stretched out. I did this with a flat screen tv and couldnt do it. Made me sick lol

cheers