Sharing Monitor with Laptop

[Kamdar]

Before my wife's catastrophic hard drive failure her laptop worked like this... When an additional monitor was plugged in, it would display the exact same thing as her laptop. This would happen whether her laptop screen was up or down. This is how we wanted it!

After getting her laptop back from the shop with a new hard-drive, I cannot seem to duplicate the way we had it set up before. The only thing I can do is Extend the monitors so windows and cursors can be moved from one screen to another. When I uncheck "Attached" on monitor 2 the image on the stand-alone monitor goes away. Funny thing is, when I start up the computer, I see the Windows welcome page on both monitors, but after that nothing on the second monitor. I probably spent almost two hours on this last night and I'm very frustrated! My wife is running XP Home and the other monitor is a Samsung SyncMaster 174v.

Wish I could figure out how I did this the first time (painlessly, as I remember). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Impera]

Hi Kamdar,

What laptop do you have? Dell, HP, Compaq?
Most laptops have a Function Key on the keyboard (regularly labeled Fn) and also, they have several icons or descriptions on the F keys (for example, mine has a small battery icon on the F3 key)
Search for an icon that has something similar to a monitor with a laptop on it. With your monitor plugged into the laptop, hit the Fn and the icon keys to switch between the different video modes available for plugged in monitors. There are Mirror image, Extended desktop and External monitor image only modes. You can choose from there the one you prefer.
Hope it helps !

Regards !

 

[Kamdar]

Thank you Impera! I was at my wits end! Her laptop is a Gateway. I will look for that function key and hopefully figure out which F# key it is when I get home from work tonight! Funny... the last place I thought to look was on the laptop keyboard!

 

[Kamdar]

Thanks again! Worked like a charm. Just finished reinstalling her Printer and Keyboard (of course she misplaced the driver discs!). Now I just have a weekend filled with re-installing all of the wife's programs! Office, Anti-virus, etc... Oh, and trying to reverse engineer iTunes from her iPod! That'll be fun!

I forget how troublesome starting over can be. Anyway, thank you again!

 

[raybro]

Might I suggest for future reference... If you had installed Acronis Tue Image had created backup images of your internal HDD on an external USB HDD, you could have simply installed the new hard drive, recovered the backup image to the internal HDD and be right back where you were before the problem with the drive developed, including the iPod stuff.

Takes about 20 - 30 minutes and includes everything on the drive just like it was before. If you would like further details, post back and they can be provided. I wouldn't be without it.

Raybro