need help with external monitor

I have a Dell XPS M1530 and a Dell 2208WFP monitor that I want to use as the main monitor, never the laptop screen. The laptop runs Win 7 Pro 64 bit (upgrade from Vista). I am a first time user of Win 7.

I hooked up the monitor with a VGA cable. But, the native 1680 X 1050 monitor will only display the 1280 X 800 resolution of the laptop. The laptop of course only has a max setting of 1280 X 800. It has an Nvidia 8600M GT card, btw.

To set up the monitor, I opened Control Panel > Windows Mobility Center and got a box with a graphic of four side-by-side choices for the setup. I chose something like "display both screens" (because the only choice for external monitor only was called something like "display projector only"). In either case, however, the monitor is always at 1280 X 800, not the monitor native 1680 X 1050.

Is there a way to get the external monitor to display 1680 X 1050?

 

Sorry, your post was a little confusing, are you extending the display? Or displaying the same thing on both monitors?

If you want to have both monitors display different things (Extended display), go to the desktop right click > displays > then select Extend Display, then there should be an option to set the resolution. I haven't used Windows 7 in a while, so the instructions may me missing a point. Haha.

Here is a page from Microsoft about dual monitors:
https://www.microsoft.com/athome/organization/twomonitors.aspx

 

OK, I just chose Projector Only and the monitor is now displaying 1680 X 1050 and the laptop screen is off, which is what I wanted. Thanks, anyway.

 

No unless your output is DVI connection I don't think you will get above 1280x800 resolution of your laptop. You can't increase that resolution unless you have a DVI connection to ouput a higher resolution. Your most likely using the VGA output and that is limited to your max resolution of your laptop screen. The only way to get a higher resolution is if your GPU is dedicated with DVI output that will give you a higher resolution. Just case your GPU is dedicated but if it doesn't have DVI out you will get whatever the max resolution of the laptop to the external monitor.

 

Not true. DOn't know where you learned of this. You might be thinking that the "first time plugged in" resolution is that the external monitor will use the laptop's internal monitor resolution, but you can easily change this.

I used to have a Tablet PC (HP TC4400) that I could output full 1920x1080 over VGA to my external monitor. Its built-in LCD was only 1024x768. Likewise for my Dell 3350 (in sig). It has a LCD screen of 1366x768 and it outputs to my external monitor over VGA at 1920x1080.

 

To add to this, VGA can support insanely high resolutions - up to 2560x1600 should be no problem. Of all the monitor technologies out there, only DisplayPort can support higher resolutions than VGA can.