VGA Failure

peteski

New Member
I have a Samsung SyncMaster P2250 monitor and an Intel(R) HD Graphics card. For more than a year I've had my monitor hooked up to my docking station with a VGA cable and whenever I hooked up my laptop the display would come up in the native resolution of 1920 x 1080. Two days ago this setup stopped working. I can't get my screen resolution to change from 1280x800, going either up or down in resolution. I updated my graphics card and monitor drivers, which had no effect. I tried restoring my system to a point a few days when it was behaving normally. Still no effect. Updated my drivers again (since this was undone in the system restore). No effect. Finally, I thought to use the VGA and DVI cables that came with the monitor. The standard VGA cable had the same problem but the DVI cable was able to give me my beautiful 1920x1080 resolution. This leads me to believe there is a hardware problem? Is that a reasonable conclusion? Unfortunately, my fujitsu lifebook does not have a VGA port on it, so I am unable to test whether the problem is with the docking station. While my DVI works just fine, I still would like to use my higher quality VGA. And also it bothers me when things aren't working correctly. Any help or ideas are welcomed.
 
first off, VGA sucks compared to DVI. DVI is Digital Video Interface, and meant for HD resolutions. VGA (Video Graphics Array) is a low quality analog signal, but is a wide standard for laptops.

Second off, Intel HD is part of the processor. You shouldn't be getting hardware problems without processor related issues too. I would guess that it is a dock related issue.
Check in the GMA control center and be sure you don't have your screen set to mirror. That would ( i think) lock your resolution to the lower of the two (like my laptop would drop to 1366*768, which is my external monitors highest resolution, not 1440*900 like my lappy).
 
Yes, thank you for setting me straight on the better cable. That puts less emphasis on figuring out the VGA thing. But I have checked repeatedly and the screens are not set up to mirror. I have the hunch its a docking station issue. A quick search didn't turn up any for less than $88 dollars, so its looking like I might just let the issue slide. Thanks for your input.
 
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