Thinkpads Forum

So I have a X61 Tablet with an Ultrabase and I've been having trouble getting my external monitor to work. I had an old Sony CRT and it use to work for months, then one day it just stopped. I thought it might of had to do something with updating drivers (WinXP drivers were never made for the monitor after all and it was just detected as a generic plug-and-play monitor). Anyways I didn't like the monitor much, so I just bought a Samsung SyncMaster 2253BW 22-inch LCD and well apparently the issue is bigger than I thought it was and I'm still getting the same kind of problem.

What happens is when i extend or clone the desktop to the monitor, it just stays black and the power light blinks. Occasionally it will stay solid for some reason, but not usually for that long. I've tried a lot of things including:

-Installing the latest monitor drivers (including a windows update for it)
-Installing the latest video drivers
-Then I tried installing the previous, older version of the video driver and haven't been able to find anything older.
-Tried both VGA ports (the one on the laptop and the one on the Ultrabase)
-Updated my BIOS (I suppose it could be a setting i'm overlooking within the BIOS, but I can't imagine what it would be in this case)
-Uninstalled Presentation Director (but have since reinstalled it)
-Checked that I don't have Adobe Type Manager

I'm running WindowsXP Tablet Edition w/ SP3 and all updates. I know the monitor works as it has a floaty analog signal box thing as it waits for the signal (which disappears when i plug the cable into the computer) and it also passes its own monitor test. Is there any reason to believe that using the digital video cable with a VGA converter would change anything? I don't know what else to try at this point.

I found one other forum post about this when googling this problem, but it never seemed to get resolved. Anyone? This is driving me insane and killing my work.

It sounds like the ThinkPad/Intel utilities do detect an external monitor, but are just unable to turn it on. Does this sound right?

If you fully power down your ThinkPad, and then power it on with the external monitor attached, you should see the screens coming up on the external monitor -- well before video drivers are loaded. If you don't see anything, then I fear it may be the video circuitry that's failing.

And on an off-chance -- you have tried with two different video cables, right?

yeah, there is a detection, just no display. having it connected while it boots up is no different and i have tired different video cables.

i'm starting to wonder if this is a relatively common issue with the hardware, as i've heard several people come across with this issue.

To see the Thinkpad logo on your external monitor on startup you do need to set the bios option for boot on VGA.

no change when i set it to VGA mode via the BIOS. although the monitor power light does stay constantly solid instead of blinking like it tends to, but eventually i get the to the windows login screen and it switches back to the laptop as the primary screen.