[JosePantalones]

Alright, this is my first post, so forgive me if I leave out something important.

Yesterday I bought a nice new Insignia 720p LCD widescreen HDTV. I want to use it as a second monitor, so that I can have separate things on each screen. It's got VGA, component, s-video, composite, and HDMI inputs, so figuring something out on that end shouldn't be much of a hardware issue.

I've already gotten it to work as a second monitor, but the resolution leaves a lot to be desired.

My PC is somewhat short on output options. For video output it has one VGA and one S-video port. At the moment I'm using the lone VGA output from my CPU to connect to my standard monitor (1280x1024), and an S-video cable to connect to the TV, but the highest resolution the TV can get through that method is 1024x768. Also, using the s-video input the TV only wants to receive a standard format image, not widescreen. If I set up the resolution to be any higher than 1024x768 the picture still goes through, but it doesn't all display at once - when you scroll your mouse to the edge of the visible area, the screen just pans. It won't shrink the screen size down to a higher resolution, if that makes sense to you. It makes the image bigger, but leaves it as a low resolution.

I have a graphics card from ATI, though I'm not sure of the model exactly. I know it's not a graphics card problem, however, because before I connected the TV with the s-video cable (in other words, when there was no second monitor connected) the resolution choices for the second monitor went up to ridiculous sizes, much larger than my TV, which is 1366x768.

So far the only solution I've found online was to just buy a new graphics card, but after shelling out $600 yesterday, any big purchase is out of the question for a while.

Any ideas? I'd really REALLY appreciate any help...

As a matter of fact, even if you can't think of a way to fix this please post something, just so I know whether or not I need to try to fix it.


Also, on a side note, does anyone know how to make the side of the screen that you slide your mouse off of change? It's kind of annoying, because I have the TV to the left of my monitor, but my mouse has to slide off the right side of my screen to get to it...

Thanks again!

[JosePantalones]

Please? Somebody?