Vista, docking and disabling laptop display

As I slowly find my way around Vista and mourn the loss of the hardware profile capability XP has I'm wondering if anyone has a tip to set up a T400 so when it's docked it automatically disables the internal display and boots straight to the external DVI display.

With XP I could put my T61 in the dock, switch it on, and handle everything (passwords etc.) via the external monitor. The laptop display never even came on. I can;t get Vista to switch to the external monitor until the ATI/Presentation Director processes are loaded, which is not a huge deal but a bit of a pain considering I can barely open the laptop when it's docked so typing passwords is tricky.

 

Should be a bios setting to tell it where to default the display to.

 

I thought the bios was the key, too, but the display options in the bios do not (AFAIK) support automatic detection and the monitor options are only the Thinkpad display or VGA (and I use DVI).

I'm beginning to wonder if my XP setup was a fluke.

 

Jaredy, he is asking to sense what system he is booting on and to make the appropriate response there.

Renee

 

I'm beginning to suspect this is a switchable graphics issue, seeing as how the intel GPU cannot run the DVI output on the dock (a known issue AFAIK). So maybe disabling switchable graphics and using only the discrete GPU solve the problem... I'll try that.

If that does work, however, I then have the problem of how to go back to switchable when the machine is not in the dock without havig to go back into the bios and change it. Any ideas?!