EL80 and video output

Hi. I have a problem making my el80 to send signal to external lcd monitor in windows xp and vista. I plug in the vga connector and everything's fine and dandy as long (external lcd working and notebook's panel is not) as I am in bios/post phase or OS selection menu (grub). When I boot xp or vista the external panel goes into standby mode and the notebook's panel turns on. Strangely, everything works fine in ubuntu. Has anybody had similar problems?

 

Do you have the external monitor enabled in Display Properties?

 

Sorry, I haven't stated my question clearly. I can enable the external display in display properties and enable dual view and so on, but I want the notebook to send the vga signal only to the external display, so the notebook's panel remains off (I know it's kinda strange but I find it useful). Problem is I can achieve that only during boot phase and in linux, and it seems that xp and vista drivers are overriding these settings.

 

So, can you explain why you want to waste the resource of using 2 screens independently at the same time? It is so much more productive to have different applications open on each screen.

However if you really want to disable your laptop screen, just go into Display Properties>Advanced and make your external monitor #1 and your laptop #2. Then close out of there and disable the laptop screen...(whew...what a waste though)

 

Thanks, it worked. My desk is too small for 22" lcd and an opened notebook and also I'm getting performance hit when running some games in dual view (or is there some way to disable one screen automatically when running certain applications?).

 

No need to do it automatically. It is too easy to go into Display Properties and make the settings do what you want them to.

 

I'm about to set up an external (22" LCD) on my HEL 80 as well, and wondered about the gaming performance when pushing 2 screens at the same time.

Couldn't you just Fn+F3 till you're only output is through the VGA? Thats through the bios as far as I understand.

BTW, hows the 22" LCD look with the VGA? I've had some concerns that a 22" might need DVI to look decent.

 

When playing battlefield 2 the fps went from ~60 to 45-50; I haven't tried other games. Pressing Fn+F3 resulted only in some artifacts showing up for 2 seconds (horizontal lines on external monitor). I didn't use DVI for it yet so it might look a bit worse with VGA but it still looks good enough for me.

 

I use 2 external Samsung 22" SyncMaster 225bw's. One is connected with my VTBook PCMCIA video adapter with DVI and the other is connected to my VGA port on the laptop...I cannot see any difference.

 

Wowzers! Is that thing basically a 2nd video card, or does the GPU still do all the processing and memory stuff?

Pretty wild, I can't quite see a use for three screens yet, but if I ever do, it's something to keep in mind.

 

The VTBook is a separate video adapter that runs one of the externals by itself, and the laptop runs its own screen plus one of the externals.

Everyone at PNB uses 3 monitors. It is so much more productive to have different applications open on each screen (e.g. email, browser, Word or Excel).