So I’ve got a Win 8.1, 32-bit laptop (well, really, one of those hybrid tablet-deals) I’d like to connect to my large external monitor at home for convenience. I do the same thing with my old Ubuntu laptop, it works just peachy.
However, the hybrid only has a micro-HDMI port, and the monitor’s got a VGA connection. So I got an adaptor, which works fine—I can connect the hybrid to the projector at work without problems.
But as soon as I try to connect the hybrid to my monitor, everything goes to crap—the hybrid’s screen goes black, and the monitor just complains ‘out of reach’, i.e. presumably a wrong resolution. Nothing I can see how to influence changes anything about that (I don’t know the English names of the menus I’ve accessed to try and fix this, so here’s screenshots of where I’ve fiddled around: display settings, sidebar, and that screen that pops up when I connect the HDMI adaptor). None of the settings I’ve tried seemed to have any effect at all. Neither does the ‘switch displays’ hotkey; the hybrid’s screen just stays perpetually dark.
The weirdest thing is, it used to work, kinda—the resolution was quite shitty, but I was at least able to get a picture on the external monitor. I fiddled around with the settings for a bit, but nothing seemed to help; then after I tried again, what now happens is that everything just goes black the moment I try to connect (even if the external monitor’s off). Nevertheless, both the adaptor and the monitor appear to be working well on their own.
Any ideas? The only thing I can come up with is that the adaptor sends out a signal that’s a bit shitty, which the projector could still interpret, but my monitor can’t. Is that possible? I’ll try with a different monitor at work tomorrow, see what happens, if none of you can solve the case till then…
Thanks for your suggestions, but unfortunately, it didn’t help. I’d fiddled with the resolutions earlier, but without connecting an external monitor, this apparently only affects the hybrid’s screen, and as soon as I connect the external, everything goes black. When I unplug, I can very briefly see the resolution for the second monitor (1280 x 960, I believe) which stays the same no matter what I try to set.
…OK, while writing this post, I spent some time blindly clicking things while the monitor was plugged in. (The third menu pops up automatically, and lets you choose resolution; it briefly stays open when disconnected, and I think I managed to click ‘OK’ in time. But there really ought to be a better solution…) It’s working now—not perfectly, but perhaps we can take it from here.
Is there any firmware or driver updates for the monitor or the HDMI-VGA adapter?
I once thought this would be a stupid question until I had a couple of monitors that would periodically stay black and insist they had no connection. Apparently, monitors now have firmware (boy do I feel old; I didn’t even realize that monitors had a connection to the computer over which a firmware update could be communicated). A simple download/update fixed the problem.
So I managed to get it working perfectly yesterday, just as I’d hoped it would. Then I unplugged the external. Put the hybrid into sleep mode. Woke it up today, plugged it in again. That’s all I did—I didn’t change any configuration, I didn’t even power down the hybrid. It seems to me that everything still ought to be the way it was when it worked.
Only now, it once again doesn’t. Same phenomenology—try to plug in the external monitor, everything goes dark, and stays dark. If it’s a problem with the resolution, why would windows suddenly decide to change it, after it worked previously? And what the hell in any case would be the utility of having the main screen go dark? I can’t figure this out.
After having memorized the command combination that prints the screen directly to the printer (print screen, win+s, ‘paint’, return, ctrl-v, ctrl-p, down (select correct printer), return—is there a shorter way to do this? Not that I hope it comes up often…), I finally got things to work again by bashing Fn+F5 in frustration, whereupon suddenly both screens lit up, and I could setup the correct resolution. I’ve got no idea. Let’s see what happens next time!