Help forcing non-native resolution for external monitor.

April 12, 2009 8:00 AM

Need help forcing older laptop to power external LCD monitor at a resolution of 1280 x 768.

I've got a Gateway Solo 1450 laptop with an Intel 830M graphics chip inside. I need to hook up via VGA at large LCD monitor to it. The monitor has a native resolution of 1280 x 768.

My problem is that the 830M doesn't support that resolution. The closest resolutions I can choose are 1280 x 720 and 1280 x 760. The problem is that everything on the screen looks our of proportion with those.

Anything I can do?

Thank you!

posted by Jackie_Treehorn to computers & internet (6 comments total)

It's possible that, if you plug the video cable from the laptop into the LCD, then unplug and re-plug the LCD's power cable, it'll automatically detect the correct resolution. It's also possible that you can do this from the LCD's menus (it'll be called 'auto-detect,' 'auto-adjust,' or something similar).

Alternately, it's also possible that updating the graphics driver in the laptop would allow you access to more resolutions. This page can help with that.

Don't know for sure if any of those will work, or if you've tried 'em already, but they should be fairly easy to try.
posted by box at 8:22 AM on April 12

I ran into this problem when I bought a new screen and tried marrying it to my old old desktop. First, update your drivers. Find the latest drivers from Intel for your chipset. Then, Chuckles offered this advice for adjusting the resolution:
Below the Screen Resolution slider in the Display Properties window, Settings tab, you will see an Advanced button. Go in there, in the Adapter tab click on List All Modes, and see if you have any luck there.
If your screen's native resolution isn't listed there after you've got the most recent drivers, I'm pretty sure there's not a lot you can do outside of 1) Upgrading the laptop's graphics card (Is that possible? I had to buy a cheap PCI card for my desktop, which fixed my problem.) 2) Finding a different screen or 3) Dealing with crappy output. I couldn't find any way of forcing my old graphics card to output an unsupported resolution.
posted by carsonb at 9:34 AM on April 12

This page will help you update your graphics drivers.
posted by carsonb at 9:39 AM on April 12

Oh, OK, something else: The monitor doesn't have to run at its native resolution, unless you say it does of course. You may be able to adjust it to something (using the menus on the screen itself) that matches a resolution your 830m can produce, which will probably not have a widescreen aspect ratio. Widescreens just weren't popular enough to account for back when your computer was produced.
posted by carsonb at 10:00 AM on April 12

Powerstrip will let you use custom resolutions.
posted by wongcorgi at 10:35 AM on April 12

Can't you just set the video resolution to 1024x768 and set the monitor to 4:3 aspect ratio? Most widescreen LCDs (I am assuming this is widescreen) should have this option somewhere in their setup menu, as far as I know.
posted by neckro23 at 6:38 PM on April 12