Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with laptop and display

Why is my laptop display tiled?

tdismukes — Fri, 15 May 2009 05:55:10 -0800

Why is my laptop display tiled and how can I fix it? When I booted up my laptop this morning, the entire display (including during POST) was tiled on the screen 4 times, with a broad black vertical line in-between the right and left sides of the screen. (Actually I can see the very top portion of two more tiles at the very bottom of the screen, so maybe I should say 6 tiles.)

I've rebooted a couple of times, and the problem remains. I would search around in my control panel for some sort of display setting which might cause this, but the tiling makes the fonts so small as to be just about completely illegible. If I knew exactly where to find the setting, I might be able to navigate to it, but there's no way I can just browse around to find it.

I've googled and found a couple of other people on tech forums with the exact same problem, but neither of them had found any answers yet.

My laptop is a Compaq Presario V6444US running Windows XP with all the latest updates.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

PB G4 17in Display: Am I really screwed, or just kinda screwed?

fontophilic — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 18:45:57 -0800

My PowerBook G4 17in, with the dreaded W85 serial number is displaying (or rather not) a white 1.25in vertical block down the left side. Turned on my PowerBook G4 this morning, checked email, closed the lid and then went out for the rest of the day. Came back, opened it up and I've got this 1.25 inch dead while line down the left side of my screen. Doing a screen capture of this area reveals what should be there, and problem persists after restarting, leaving me to conclude hardware problem. It's about 4 years old, even extended apple care is long gone. It could be much worse, as this laptop is currently my livelihood, and I have access to an external monitor.

Doing some research I found that there is a known problem with serials that start with W85 for this model. Allegedly due to shoddy assembly in China. Apple censors it at every turn.

However, this is my question. These cases tend to look like a few lines, scattered around, but mine [1, 2] is a solid white vertical block Is there any chance that when I got my new hard drive installed at best buy a month ago, they pulled a monitor pin out or something along those lines?

Wishful thinking, or am I going to say good by to $300?

(the old hard drive was working fine, just too small)

Where is Vista Contrast Adjust?

Juicylicious — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 16:06:45 -0800

How do I adjust the contrast on my Inspiron running Vista? Everything looks washed out :-(

I did ask Dell support, but the tech kept telling me to adjust the brightness, which is not contrast. I've used my googlefu with no luck.

WSXGA+ LED, where art thou?

knave — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 19:16:08 -0800

LongshotFilter: Does anyone know if any 15.4" WSXGA+ panels with LED backlights are coming to market soon? As far as I can tell, no one is selling a 15.4" laptop with a WSXGA+ (1650x1080) LED-backlit screen (I'd love to be proven wrong!). I know it's unlikely, but does anyone out there have any idea if there's one in development or coming to market any time soon?

My current alternatives are basically 1440x900 LED or 1650x1080 CCFL, and I just can't make up my mind between the two.

Mail, stay! Stay! Bad dog!

explosion — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 07:02:38 -0800

How do I limit an application to one screen of a dual-screen setup in Mac OS X (Leopard)? A coworker recently switched from a desktop to a laptop at work, and I'm in charge of helping her work the kinks out and otherwise keep the migration as painless as possible.

She is using a Powerbook G4 connected to an Apple Display, and for all intents and purposes, she only uses the monitor at work. Normally, mirroring displays would solve the problem, but the laptop is a wide-screen computer, so mirrored displays leads to a letterbox effect on the computer.

The issue: Apple Mail seems to want to open new windows on the second (laptop) window, and we cannot figure out how to fix this behavior. Even if we drag the windows over, the next one opened will be back on the secondary monitor. As long as the external display is plugged into the laptop, the dock and menu bar are on the external display, so I am assuming OS X thinks of it as the primary display.

So I guess the crux of it is, how do I force applications to open new windows only in one display or the other?

Laptop display is suddenly very dark

sotalia — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 06:54:36 -0800

Weird laptop display problem: A second after starting it up, the screen gets very, very dark. I have a Dell Inspiron 8600, and I'm running Windows XP. When I start it up, I can see the Dell splash screen for a second and then the Windows XP splash screen for a second, but then the screen gets very, very dark. If I stare at it really hard, I can just make out the outline of what's there. I hooked up the laptop to an external monitor, and everything works fine on that. Is this a video card problem? If so, is it something that I can probably fix myself?

Other information that may be relevant: I've been using my laptop in hot, humid tropical climate for the last month, and sometimes tiny ants try to get into the machine.

ode to red light district

SirStan — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 20:16:36 -0800

Is there a way to avoid geek'd laptop hinges? It seems as though every 6 months or so I need to call Dell to replace my hinges on my LCD because they get loose. I have recently seen a few IBM Thinkpad users with the same issue.

Is there some way to avoid this? Or is it simply a woe of the power user?

Diagnose broken laptop display?

betterton — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:51:36 -0800

How broken is my laptop display, and is it worth fixing? My laptop was overly compressed in a suitcase, and now the display is broken. When the display is on, there is a line that arcs in a semicircle across the screen. Near the top of the line there is a black circle about an inch in diameter - in the black circle nothing is displayed. At the edges of the line and the circle the display looks like it has bled - the colors look funny and there are streaks. A friend suggests the waveguide/light diffuser is broken; is this right?

What is wrong with the display? How can I find out how much it would cost to replace?

For extra bonus points, is it worth it to fix or should I get a new laptop? It is a 2-year-old IBM T43.

Crappy MacBook displays: true or false?

Venadium — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:49:56 -0800

Are the displays on the MacBook Pro really as bad as I hear they are? I've heard some talk about uneven backlighting (dark or overly bright spots), grainy displays, something about gradients being displayed incorrectly, 6 bit color depth, narrow viewing angles, etc. Has anyone here experienced any of these problems with their MacBook Pros? I'd especially like to hear from people with the 15"/2.33GHz C2D model because that's what I'll most likely be buying within a week or two.

Widescreen laptop with widescreen-unfriendly video card?

saraswati — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 11:43:24 -0800

Strange problem with a new laptop (WXGA display) and a video card that goes from 1024x768 right to 1280x1024. The specs:

Laptop: Gateway NX560XL
Video Adapter: ATI Mobility Radeon X1400
OS: Windows XP Professional SP2

How can I get the resolution to a more appropriate 1280x720 or 1280x800? 1024x768 looks pretty bad on the widescreen and 1280x1024 is too much for the laptop's owner.

How can I make a laptop display's VGA input work?

gregb1007 — Sun, 03 Dec 2006 08:01:28 -0800

What can I do to make a VGA input on an LCD monitor work? I have recently acquired someone's old 150mhz Presario 1600 (1997) laptop that has a VGA input at the back of its LCD display. I have a much newer 600mhz Presario 14XL20 whose display I threw away because it broke off from the computer.

I connected the newer laptop to the older one's VGA input, however hitting the "VGA input" button on the Presario 1600 gives me a blank screen instead of displaying the data from the other laptop.

There should be a way to make this work and I am hoping that you can give me some suggestions. A vga input in a laptop LCD display should be able to display the data from the computer connected to it. (Btw that same laptop without a diplaydoes display its data when I plug it in via the same VGA cable to my desktop PC's monitor.)

Using a PowerBook as an extra display...

Aanidaani — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 14:43:58 -0800

Is it possible for me to use my PowerBook G4 as a display -- meaning, can I connect some input source and view it just like I would an external LCD? I'm not planning on upgrading my computer until the summer of next year, but I wanted to see if I could use my old PowerBook G4 just like an external monitor. The mac comes with a port and an adapter so that a VGA cable can be connected, but I wasn't sure if it's possible to display input on the PowerBook's display. Does anyone know anything about this?

Display problems with a Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE

tomcosgrave — Wed, 06 Sep 2006 05:58:47 -0800

My girlfriend has acquired a second-hand Sony Vaio PCG-C1VE laptop. The OS is Windows XP. Her problem is that she can't get the display out of 640x480. She's looking for display drivers, specifically video drivers and monitor drivers if such things exist - she can't find them anywhere. Has anyone got any ideas?

Help save my beloved iBook!

synecdoche — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 08:40:52 -0800

Help save my laptop! I was using my G4 iBook last night, and suddenly the screen went black. Nothing else happened-- no noises or anything-- and I had been using it for about a half hour or so. It has never done that before.

Anyway, I held down the power button to shut it down as it was not responding to anything else. I turned it off, then turned it on again. Now when I try to boot it, the start up chime does not sound. Instead the screen stays off and the fan comes on full power.

The battery was partially drained so I tried re-charging it fully. The computer come on long enough for me to see some of my startup programs boot, and then the screen went black again. Now I can't get that far again.

I've tried it with the adapter and battery in, with just the battery, and with just the adapter. Same result each time. When the fan comes on, it seems like it'd sit there running forever if I let it (I left the room and came back about 15 minutes later and it was still going).

Can anyone help? I got the iBook about a year and a half ago and have had no other problems with it. It isn't on warranty and there is no way I can afford a new one, not to mention that there are some files I really need on there (I do back up regularly, but there are some that hadn't run through my backup cycle yet).

laptop screen scorch mark?

madstop1 — Thu, 11 Aug 2005 20:29:40 -0800

My wife has hp pavillion laptop for one year, under warranty. It suddenly has a black blotch about 2-3" , lightbulb shaped, on bottom of screen. looks like it was burned onto the display screen. any ideas?

Vid problems on LCD projector

RockyChrysler — Wed, 11 May 2005 14:20:07 -0800

The school where I teach recently purchased a LCD projector and I'm having some trouble getting it to play video... [mi] It's a Hitachi cp-x328 and it seems to be working fine, until i try to play a video file (ie: avi, .mpg, vts type files) in windows media player or powerdvd. quicktime converts/plays the aforementioned files fine (vts, of course being the exception). but wmp and powerdvd just show a blank screen on the projector image, despite the fact that the laptop dispaly is showing the playback fine. all the other desktop features are still visible on the projector's display, but the video window is just black. the children will not accept this.

both the laptop and the projector are set to 60hz. the projector's set to auto select the video input type, but even when i manually switch to ntsc i still get no video playback. however, the projector's picking up the audio signal fine. what am i missing? the problem seems like it should be simple enough to solve, but i'm stumped.

Weird display problems in Windows

tomorama — Sun, 24 Apr 2005 13:00:18 -0800

My girlfriend has a fairly new Dell laptop that has suddenly developed a few problems. The one that confuses me the most is a display problem. One day the computer turned on and the "Add/Remove Programs" window looked like this:

I have no clue what's causing it or how to fix it - it's persisted for weeks through multiple reboots, and seems to have nothing to do with the programs displayed before and after it in the programs list.

The second problem I'm pretty sure I've diagnosed, but I don't know how to fix it. When idle, the computer makes a rythmic clicking sound. I'm guessing that it's coming from the hard drive. Everything I've turned up through Google searches tells me that this is a sign of a failing hard drive, so what can I do to prolong its life?