Ned advice on setting up external monitor on laptop (1 Viewer)

[John Wilson]

Hi.
I'm trying to setup an older eMachines M5309 laptop as a desktop replacement for an old Dell 4100. The laptop has a ATI Radeon IGP 320M video adapter with 64mb memory. What I would like to do is set up the external monitor (Dell Ultrasharp 1905) as the only monitor via the laptop's VGA port and set that resolution to 1280x1024. I can't seem to find the settings to use on the ATI s/w screen to disable the widescreen (native resolution 1280x800) display on the laptop and have just the Dell monitor show the desktop.

Any suggestions on what to try? I can't find any updated drivers on eMachines/ Gateway's website for this ATI card.

Thanks for your help

 

[nolesrule]

The only setting that should matter is under Display Properties (settings tab). You should be able to set monitor #2 to the resolution you want. The notebook screen should be disabled if you close the lid (make sure you don't have a hibernate or standby feature set for closing the lid under power settings).

 

[Kean-Hock Yeap]

If you press the "Fn" and "F4" key combination, you should be able to cycle through the "laptop display,", "external display only," and "laptop and external displays" modes. Cycle it till you get the "external display only" mode and then you can change it to whatever resolution you want.