LCD screen to laptop connection...

We bought this huge LCD display for the receptionist office. They want to play a powerpoint on it for clients coming it. They will display the scheduled clients name on the display or some crap..

Anyways..

When I hook it up to the laptop with the VGA cable, all of the icons and such on the big display are huge. The display is only showing maybe 1/4 of the computer screen.

The display does not have any settings to properly size the screen. The laptop cannot shrink to a resolution small enough to make everything proportional on the big display.

Is the laptop going to need a new video card? Should we be hooking this up through DVI?

Whats the deal here?

Does the laptop have the ability to run the external port as a 2nd monitor? My desktop for example can drive two separate monitors at once with different things on them. They can be at separate resolutions. The better laptop video cards will do that as well.

Mine is run through VGA. We're talking about superior Apple hardware here though.

Funny, had this exact problem yesterday with a Viewsonic 28" LCD display...

When the user connected by DVI (actually DVI to HDMI cable since the display only has HDMI, not DVI) everything was fine... aside form the fact the cable itself was damaged and there was signal loss anytime someone touched/moved the cable slightly...

Since we didn't have a spare DVI to HDMI cable around I tried to set it up with a VGA cable since the computer had both outputs and the display had both inputs...

However to my surprise the display couldn't show full res via the VGA cable (1920 x 1200) no matter what settings I made to the display or the computer/adapter it would display 1920x1200 at a quarter of the resolution and when you moved the mouse around the screen the screen would just follow you so you could never see more than about 25% of the screen at once...

By the time I lowered the res enough for the screen to show it all at once it was badly pixelated...

I couldn't fix it, ended up putting back the damaged cable until the reaplcement came in today.

I don't know if it's only this display or a limit on analog inputs in general.

The laptop can use the LCD as a 2nd monitor. We want the same thing being displayed on both monitors. Even using the TV as a second monitor, the laptop cannot take the resolution high enough to see the entire computer screen on the LCD.

We had it to 1050x1400 I think.. it wasnt nearly enough.

We really dont care what the resolution looks like on the laptop, we just need it to look correct on the display.

BOP, are you saying we wont be able to run this kind of res with the VGA cable?

If you don't care what it looks like on the laptop then just shut the laptop display off and only output to the external monitor...

As for what you're doing I think I read it backwards the first time... If you're 'cloning' the display - you want the same thing on both the built in screen and external then both screens will be set to the same resolution.

If you can set them both to the native resolution of the big external display then the display will look good but the built in screen will be missing a large part of the screen and it will kind of follow the mouse around as you scroll.

If you set them both to the max native resolution of the built in screen then likelythe external display will fill the whole screen but will be pixelated as a lower resolution image is being stretched to fit.

There's no option to have both screens display the same thing at different native resolutions.

As for what I said- depending on the laptop/computer - the maximum resolution you can get over the VGA cable may be limited and a DVI cable may be needed to get the full resolution you expect- that is the problem in my case. After reading the specs on the display itself I strongly think the issue is with the graphics card on the laptop.

I do to.. I tried hooking up a little newer laptop and it was able to do like 1400x1600 or something.. still wasnt enough.

We arent concerned with what the resolution looks like on the laptop because we would just use the big display as the monitor if needed. Im not trying to get 2 different resolutions.

I guess we have to see if we can use a DVI. I know the laptop does not have a DVI output and on top of that, I cant find a damn driver for that laptops video card thats recent...