Using external LCD as primary monitor

Hi all,

My girlfriend has a HP Pavilion zx5170 which has an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600. Recently, the laptop's internal LCD has been suffering from severe flickering. We'd like to make use of an external 22'' LCD we have here in the house.

Unfortunately, when I plug in the VGA cable on her laptop, I can put the external LCD as "extended desktop", but I can't make it the primary display, which is what we intend. The option to "use this device as my primary monitor" is grayed out. I've read online that some graphic cards do not support changing the primary monitor. Is this the case?

What can I do to make this work? If I can't fix this, we're looking at buying a new laptop, which isn't really a welcome expense at this time.

Any help is appreciated!

 

Not sure about HPs, but you should be able to switch over to the monitor through a keystroke. One of the function keys should have a little monitor or something like it on it.

For example, on a Dell, you can press Fn+F8 to switch to external only.

Otherwise, you might be able to switch it in the display properties. Make the external the primary monitor and then disable the internal.

 

I already tried the Fn+F4 keystroke. And as stated above, the option to make the external monitor primary is greyed out.

Any further suggestions are appreciated.

 

Give this a try.

Go to HP site and get the current GPU driver for the model and install it completely - meaning take the default installation settings. Remove the current one first.