VGA output does not work

[Steve06]

Dear all,

my T61 14" with a T7500 CPU, 3GB of RAM and Windows VISTA does not output to external devices like beamers and screens anymore. It has always worked perfectly until today, when I had to give a lecture. I always switch to external mode by pressing Fn + F7. I tried it many times, with both a beamer and a screen - but it didn't help.

I've never had problems with this same laptop and this same beamer before.

Can anybody help out? It's definately not the beamer's fault, since it worked flawlessly with a student's notebook.

Do you think its more a hardware or more a Vista issue?

I appreciate any helpful comment.

Steve

[andyP]

If you have a T61 14" and T7500, I am presuming you have the nVidia NVS 140 graphic. (it could be an important factor).
I know of two similar cases where everything was fine, then it just didn' work. In one of the cases only the top right corner 16th of the external screen or projection was visible, (and this strangely enough was the bottom left corner 16th of the TP display).
The problem, in both cases, was that windows had offered a nvs140 driver along with other windows updates which was accepted and installed.
The solution was to reinstall the original driver which should I believe be in C:\swtools\drivers\video, or for download here
I hope this helps, if not sorry, but do let the community know.

[Steve06]

AndyP, you hit the nail on the head - I manually reinstalled the driver from the homepage and now it works perfectly again.

I wonder why this issue has not been adressed by windows update.

another question: do you know, why the screen resolution is driven down when i connect to an external device (this is the case for both the notebook lcd and the external device). Isn't it possible to have "full" resolution (1400x900) on both displays?

what if you connect via DVI (via a docking station)?

[andyP]

AndyP, you hit the nail on the head - I manually reinstalled the driver from the homepage and now it works perfectly again. snip...

STRIKE!

..snip...I wonder why this issue has not been adressed by windows update..snip....

Because the driver you are getting through windows update is newer that the one from lenovo, but, the driver from lenovo has more than likely been tweaked by their engineers.

..snip..Isn't it possible to have "full" resolution (1400x900) on both displays?..snip...

Assuming the external screen can do 1440x900 I would simply set up a profile in Presentation Director, this will work with analogue or DVI.