This has been ongoing for about a month or so now. My laptop (Vaio Z series) has a native resolution of 1366x768. I usually have it connected to my external monitor via HDMI, which has a resolution of 1920x1080. Up until a month ago, when I would disconnect the HDMI cable the screen on my laptop would switch back to its 1366x768 and all would be well. But now when I disconnect the HDMI cable, my laptop refuses to switch to 1366x768. In fact, when I try to manually change the display resolution, that isn’t even an option. It continues to keep the 1920x1080 even though that means that I can’t see the bottom and right most portions of my screen.
The only thing I can seem to tie it to is using the Windows 7 update and allowing my computer to turn off and then back on. If I restore my system to prior to the last Windows update, all goes back to normal. I don’t know what update is screwing up the problem, and while I can keep “solving” the problem like this, it’s not really an ideal solution. I tried looking in the registry to find any values for screen resolution but it turns out I have no idea what’s what in there, so I stopped before I did anything bad.
Any ideas? It’s really not a problem when I have it connected to my monitor, but when I actually use my laptop as a laptop, it’s pretty inconvenient to not be able to see the taskbar.
Turn off automatic updates, at least for now. Restore to where it works right. Then update one by one until you find the bad one. Then remove that one from the update list. I’m not sure you can do that permanently and go back to auto updates. I never use the auto update for this specific reason. You could use the manual update for a few weeks and then try to insert the “bad” update as a test. For some strange reason, coming back to an update that has failed in the past sometimes installs with no problem.
Sounds like you’ve had a video driver update that has enabled a virtual screen.
Bizarre. Before I saw your responses (thanks by the way!), I had more Windows updates that installed. Somehow that apparently fixed the resolution back to what it was before. It’s a mystery to me, but as long as it’s working I’m happy, so I’m not going to pursue this anymore. Thanks guys!