Thinkpads Forum

Hello there,

A colleague at my office has asked me to set up his T61 so that he can connect it to the monitor in his office and be able to Fn+F7 between them, or have them both on at the same time, etc, as he'd like. This sounded simple enough, and this I did, but the (wide) screen on the T61 and the usual, more regular-sized screen on his desk monitor use very different resolutions, and neither looks good with the resolution that's optimum for the other. I've spent an hour playing around with the display settings and all I've managed to do is get some kind of dual-view setup, with the two screens displaying entirely different things. As cool as dual-view certainly is, this wasn't what we were looking for.

I'd like to be able to do some kind of clone between the screens, but with one screen having a different resolution. After looking around through the settings for the time I did, I'm very tempted to say it's impossible, and this would indeed be the verdict I'd have reached, if I hadn't seen a similar setup on the machines used by other people in the office. Perhaps those people had found a "compromise" resolution, I don't know, but to get to my question: Is it possible to have a laptop clone its display to another monitor, with a different resolution on the other screen?

Thanks for your help in advance.

I see two ways to interpret your question:

1. "Can I have a cloned display where the second display has a different physical resolution than the first?" The answer is yes. One way would be to set the resolution to the higher of the two. The lower resolution display would be in "virtual" mode where the displayed area would be a frame that pans around a larger desktop.

2. "Can I have my desktop area be cloned to a secondary display with less resolution, and the image squeezed down to fit in the reduced resolution" The answer to that is generally no.


Let's say your Thinkpad has a display that 1024x768, and you want to clone to a display that's, say, 1600x1200. That's easy. Either CCC or the monitor can scale the image up to 1600x1200. You'll have the same desktop image as on the 1024x768, but just scaled larger for the secondary display. Or, you can have the 1024x768 image centered on the secondar display with a black frame around the outside.

Now let's say that your Thinkpad has a 1600x1200 display, but your external display is 1024x768. In this case, you can a) set the external as the primary display, and then see the preceeding paragraph, or b) Set the external display to show 1600x1200, and you'll get the "virtual" resolution mode. Your Thinkpad cannot scale the 1600x1200 desktop down to 1024x768, and I've never seen a monitor that can do this either. Scale up, yes. Scale down, no.

I hope this helps.

Hm, unfortunately it was probably #2 on your list I was looking for.

Thanks for your help, of course - though allow me to clarify.

The widescreen ThinkPad, from memory, looks best with 1280x768 resolution. When a clone is in place to a monitor (1024x768), the wide 1280 display is unattractively squashed into 1024 pixels wide on the monitor, so I was hoping that a different resolution could be used on the desktop monitor.

Aforesaid colleague isn't here at the moment, and neither is his T61, but if I was to do as you suggested and make the 1024x768 monitor the primary monitor, would the ThinkPad be able to scale it up to a resolution suitable for widescreen viewing, or would the results simply be the opposite of before (1024 pixels clumsily stretched to fill 1280)? If that's the case I may as well leave it as it is.