Be Excellent To Each Other

Hello.

My laptop screen is well and truly bust. I was hoping to just hook up the laptop to a monitor or my telly for the time being until I get the screen fixed or buy a new laptop.

The only two video outputs on my laptop are s-video and VGA, what would be better for hooking up to a HD telly. Also which would be cheaper.

Also probably the biggest question, is it actually possible to change the video output without using the original laptop screen?

VGA. Cheap as chips.

Changing over should be easy enough - mine's got a special button for switching between modes but most have a button assigned to a function key.

i hook my laptop up to plasma screen with VGA the results are great

on mine its fucntion f8

VGA, I'd think.

You can usually find a shortcut key for external output, it's typically Fn plus one of the early function keys, something like F4. It'll look like this: ¦[]¦

VGA. S-video is totally unsuited and will not only look awful but will induce a headache in minutes.

I remember having a Matrox card for my PC that had s-video out. Hoorah I thought, big screen gaming!

20 minutes after rigging it all up and playing some motorcycle game I ended up in bed with a splitting headache.

Cheers all. I'm finally back.

I've ordered an S-video to scart lead just to prove Chinny wrong.

Good thinking! What the fuck does Chinny know about AV stuff, anyway?

He's a moany old sod, and is the video-equipment equivalent of Gaywood and his bitrates.

New band name: Gaywood and the Bitrates.

"Lewie, Lewie, ooooooooh baby, who's your landline with?"

"Talktalk talktalk talktalk!"

*bends over, pats arse*

He is a lineman for the county.

What excellent luck, finding this thread.

I have the exact same problem as Runcle in the opening post, and have tried the exact same things as mentioned here re VGA cables, etc, only... it doesn't work for me.

I can't see as I'm doing anything wrong - plug the VGA cable in, put the TV onto the correct channel, switch on the laptop... I also tried the thing with pressing the Function key + F8, and all sorts of combos like this, but no joy.

Basically a message comes up on the TV screen, saying something like, "Unrecognised video format", which rather puzzles me as when I first switch it all on, I get the initial laptop start-up screen, you know where it says, "Toshiba, copyright 2008 blah blah". So I get this displayed okay, but then 30 seconds later it's essentially telling me it can't display anything...

So at the moment I'm limited to internet access at work only, and can only grab a few mins here and there throughout the day to check my personal email, look at Beex, etc, which is very frustrating.

Has anyone got any helpful suggestions? (I'm running Vista by the way, if that makes any difference to anything). Thanks in advance.

You can boot up in vga mode.

Spam F8 when windows is loading and you'll get the safe mode boot screen. Choose VGA mode and it should work fine.

Thank you! Will give that a bash tonight.

You'll need to change your resolution after it's booted. 1024x768 is a safe bet, but most LCD TVs can do 1366x768 pretty easily too.

Cheers, chum.

Woo-hoo! This worked. Thanks again.

*doffs cap*

You're welcome, fine lady.