W500 - How to use Dual Display?

[zzz]

I tried searching but couldn't find anything useful.

I have a W500 with the displayport and ATI HD3650 graphics chip. I tried installing the latest ATI 9.9 Catalyst driver from ati.com but no go on it because it doesn't find the HD3650 chip. I think for notebooks you need to install Catalyst driver from Lenovo, so I did the Thinkpad update to get the latest released driver which is 8.6. However this doesn't seem to come with Hydravision.

The only Hydravision on ati.com that I found is for 9.9 but it doesn't seem to work. I don't get any extra pull downs in the window corners to send a window to the second display, nor can I drag a window to the second display.

In my dispaly settings I can enable the second display (displayport attached) which fires up the second display, but all I have there is an empty desktop. I cannot drag windows to it. All i can do is press Fn+Space to send the window there, but that is really awkward to use since you can't get your mouse back to the primary display without doing Fn+space again.

It really seems like you need to get Hydravision working. How do you get Dual display to work?

Not sure if it matters but my second display is 1920x1200, but the empty desktop displays just fine on it.

[dr_st]

If there's an empty desktop, then you should be able to drag windows into it. Maybe you were dragging them the wrong way?

For Thinkpads I always recommend using the Presentation Director to set up dual-screen schemes.

[mjdl]

This probably isn't being helpful, but yesterday I tried an external LCD monitor (a 1280x1024 neovo F-417) for the first time on my W500, placing it on the left side of the notebook.

It was surprisingly straightforward:

1) As soon as the connected monitor was switched on, the desktop expanded to include the new monitor.
2) The resolution was wrong (1280x800) and the extra space was on the right side of the screen, so I went to the display properties and dragged-dropped the new monitor to the left of the notebook screen. At that point I noticed that it was being recognized only as a generic "Plug-and-Play" monitor (no 1280x1024 resolution available), so I started the Device Manager (windows Key + Pause, click on "Change Settings") and selected "Update Driver..." in the context menu for the PnP Display, told it to search Windows Update for an updated driver, and after several minutes of waiting, lo-and-behold, the correct resolutions and a color management profile were installed for that monitor! Amazing, Vista actually works--brief visions of Steve Ballmer and dancing flashed through my mind.
3) At that point, I fired up the ThinkVantage "Presentation Director" and edited the "Captured Settings" profile, merely giving it a new name, and making sure that it was to be displayed among the choices when pressing the Function+F7 keys. I made sure things worked by using that hot key to change back to "Notebook LCD only"--the external LCD went dark, no signal on the VGA output, and to change back to the new profile--the external lit up again with the new desktop space on the left side of the notebook LCD, as required.

In short, the presentation director is quite useful even for simple setups like mine and would be probably even more so if I had to give presentations on a host of different external equipment configurations.

I'm somewhat surprised that Lenovo is eliminating it in the Thinkvantage Windows 7 line-up of utilities. See http://lenovoblogs.com/insidethebox/?p=270

[Aroc]

I can only offer praise for Presentation Director used in conjuction with my personal Thinkpad T61p and my work provided X61s. On the T61p, I use Presentation Director to help drive my dual monitor set up with a 30 inch 2560x1600 display and a 19 inch 1280x1024 under both Windows Vista x64 and Windows XP x86.

Sometimes I put the two monitors into "old man mode" e.g., 30 @ 1680x1050 and the 19@ 1024x768, and with computer "remembers" that setting until I change both settings back to respective native resolution.

[Hackster]

Presentation director is excellent. The only issues I have run into with Presentatino Director was with some external monitors/TVs, when Presentation Director refused to accept a configuration that it though was not good, but, in reality worked just fine. Not a big deal though.

[FrankK-F]

Am a bit LATE on this topic ... BUT

I have been using UltraMon a utility for multiple displays management. It works in WXP/32 as well as W7/64 (I skipped Vista - so can't tell). It has served me well.

Frank