Connecting a laptop to an external monitor.

have an HP nc8430 laptop that I am trying to connect to an external (19 inch lcd wide screen) monitor. I am also very new to the world of laptops, having only previously used desktops.

The external monitor has an extra analog port that I plug the cable into.

Now, when I press fn F4 on the laptop it shows on the external monitor but looks really, really bad!! When I set the display to 1440 x 900 (the monitors default resolution) it causes the display area to get too big and then scrolls when I move to the edge of the screen. It's like it thinks the monitor is a TV or projector or something.

Is there some trick to getting a laptop to work on an lcd external monitor like any other PC that I am missing? Do I need to buy a docking station to achieve this.

Make sure the setting is either to clone or only external display ...

Check if the LCD panel has an auto-adjust feature. What is the current resolution of your laptop display - I know that mine only goes to 1024x768, and when I ran it through a 26" LCD TV it also looked terrible, but a 19" LCD monitor shoud be fine.

slightly related, check out an app called Ultramon - what every multi monitor setup needs.

I've had that same problem the other day. I've played around with the resolutions and it came right. Thing is the laptops graphic card suck so it couldn't cope playing movies on the 22" lcd. Slow as hell.

howardb said:

Check if the LCD panel has an auto-adjust feature. ..

Click to expand...

howardb is right, the auto ajust should make the picture fit the screen again. If you still have prob, go into settings, there should be options for TV, CRT and LCD/Panel, make sure it's not on TV or CRT.

Another thing, make sure that are using proper drivers for the vga card (not the native XP drivers).