Thinkpads Forum

I am still totally in love with the 240Z that I acquired last week, but there is one disappointment: it doesn't seem to allow me to extend the Windows desktop to an external monitor. I am running Windows XP Pro on this 240Z and the Settings menu in Display Properties shows only the internal LCD even when the VGA is connected to an external monitor. On most other laptops I've used, that menu would show both the internal and the external monitors, and it would also show the "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor" option for the external LCD. I tried to install Presentation Director on this machine to see if that could get around this limitation but the setup file wouldn't run. The only thing I can do is mirroring the internal LCD on an external LCD by pressing Fn+F7, which helps a bit because this allows me to get 1280x1024. But it would be even better if I could extend the internal LCD's desktop onto the external monitor, allowing me to get 1024x768 more pixels.

Has anyone had success doing this on a 240X or 240Z? I believe their innards are identical except that the 240Z has 4MB of Silicon Motion LynxEM+ graphics (instead of the 240X's 2MB), so if you can get it to work on a 240X, it should work on my 240Z as well. BTW, I have the latest BIOS.

Hello,

did you install the correct display driver for your 240Z? See the Lenovo website:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-40041

I have a 240X and when I right click on the quick launch icon for the display driver (bottom right of the screen on my Win 2000 Pro install), I can choose:

Set Dualview...

Before this will work, the display properties have to be set (at least on my 240X, don't know for sure for the 240Z) to 16 bit color depth or lower.

Give it a try and let me know if it worked.

Sorry, made a small mistake in my previous reply.
You should not choose:

Set DualView

but

Set DualApp

emeu1, thanks for the suggestion. I initially had a 2004 driver from Windows Update, and noticing that IBM's driver is 3 years older, I never bothered to try it. But upon your recommendation, I just tried it and now it supports the funky 2048x768 resolution (the 2004 driver didn't). However, it's not exactly what I wanted. In this DualApp mode, the left half of the 2048x768 is shown on the 240Z LCD while the right half is displayed on the external LCD, but the entire desktop area actually behaves like a single monitor (with an 8:3 aspect ratio), so that if I maximize a window, it occupies both screens, and I find that inconvenient. Also, I really want to have 1280x1024 on the external monitor, as an extension of the internal 1024x768. So, I am hoping that someone has gotten dual monitors to work in the conventional way on a 240X/240Z.

Nonetheless, it was interesting to try the DualApp configuration, which was new to me.