[Morpeth]

My new thinkpad laptop runs Vista Ultimate. When using an external monitor (via VGA), the screen goes black after the green loading bar. Vista is booting fine however as I can toggle to the laptop screen and see it there. The external monitor is working, as I can get the Thinkpad recovery system, BIOS, etc to display, just not Vista. I've tried every setting I can think of and tried updating the drivers but nothing helps. Are there any wiser heads out there?

[johnhe]

Does the external monitor show up in the Display setting? If it does, have you tried checking the "This is my main monitor" box in the display setting? If it doesn't, have you tried going into the device mananger to see if there is a problem with the driver?

[Morpeth]

John, thanks for your advice. I think I may be getting somewhere now. The external monitor shows up under 'Display Settings' but I could not select it as 'main monitor'; that option was greyed out. The 'Device Manager' reported that the monitor was working properly and also the drivers. However, in order to get to the 'Device Manager' quickly I set the 'Control Panel' to classic view and hence the nVidia control panel caught my eye. nVidia was set to 'only use one display'. I checked the 'configured independently' box and voila there is now life in my external monitor.

However, there are still a few curious niggles. On startup, the external monitor goes black again, this time after the logon screen (I can see a flashing mouse cursor) but when I lift the lid on the laptop I have life in both screens. The desktop is not shared but I can kind-of move the mouse on both. The icons and toolbar are visible on the screen which is checked as 'main monitor'. Also, is there any way to configure the text and icon size separately for the two displays?

Cheers, Steve

[johnhe]

It sounds like your nVidia driver is disabling the external monitor when the driver loads. You might find a solution by posting a query on the nVidia support forums at the nVidia support site www.nvidia.com.

I'm not aware of any way to specify different font and icon sizes for the external monitor other than creating a separate theme with the desired sizes and then switching to that theme when using the external monitor.

[Morpeth]

OK, my mistake, the desktop was shared. It was just that right and left was mixed up. Now I've unshared the desktop and everything works as I would expect. I'll give the tip regarding themes a try. Thanks for your help John..