Cannot game on external display

So until now I've never tried hooking my laptop up to an external display. I got it connected via VGA and I am able to view the Windows desktop on the monitor (though I had to open CCC and manually tell it to output to the external monitor, there's got to be some type of hotkey for this), but whenever I launch Bad Company 2 it makes the screen white like it's trying to launch, but then it crashes to desktop. When I disconnect the monitor and run the game on the laptop's screen, it works fine.

I even tried changing the resolution in the .cfg file from 1366x768 to 1280x720 in the event that for some reason my monitor cannot accept that resolution, and it still crashes. I tried running Halo as well to see if it was game-specific, and while the game appeared to run (and played sounds as if it was running), I cannot see anything on either screen and I had to Ctrl-Alt-Del to shut it down.

EDIT: After restarting the computer, 1280x720 output does work (I know for a fact this monitor supports 1366x768, as I've used it before, but I'll let that go for now), but for some reason my native 16x9 monitor is putting black bars on the top and bottom of the screen and stretching the output so it is distorted. It's like it's trying to display a letterboxed 4x3 signal and failing. A 1280x720 signal from my netbook, still over VGA, displays perfectly.

EDIT2: Using a HDMI cable I stole from the TV, produces similar probems. It's obviously a graphics setting somewhere causing the issues, but I can't find it.

EDIT3: On my wife's monitor, which is only 1920x1080 instead of 2048x1152, everything works perfectly once I adjust the overscan settings. They were greyed out while connected to my monitor. Is this just a problem of the laptop being unable to handle a display with a resolution higher than 1080p, even if I'm only trying to use 720p as the output resolution? What's weird is everything works perfectly on my monitor and the HDMI is even capable of producing a crisp 1:1 image at 2048x1152 (everything I've read says HDMI should not be capable of anything beyond 1080p), but the issues start when I try anything lower. Which wouldn't be a problem, except my 5730 can't game at that res.

EDIT4: Ok, this is really weird. After being connected to the wife's monitor, disconnected, and reconnected to my own, my laptop suddenly knows what to do and it's taking up the whole screen with resolutions lower than 2048x1152. Also, the settings that were previously greyed out are now available to be used.

 

Uninstall all your ATI drivers and if you have Realtek ATI HDMI drivers or something like that uninstall that too.. Run driver sweeper and than reinstall the newest versions of those drivers. Should fix your problem.

and 100 posts

 

I don't know if this will help anyone out, but I finally got it figured out. What I had to do was to create a custom resolution in the system registry and then enable GPU scaling from the CCC so my GPU upscales it to the lcd's native res instead of feeding the monitor the raw 1366x768 signal. This way I can keep on playing in the laptop's native res and have it upscaled to work on my monitor without having to keep editing the config file for every game I want to play. That was ridiculously complicated for something that should have just been plug in and go.

It still doesn't work over VGA but I'll just get another cheap HDMI cable online.

And on a side note, I found out that my 5730 is capable of playing BC2 on medium (shadows low) at 1080p. Impressive.

Also figured out I had to set my own hotkeys for automatic display switching