Wide Screen Pain

My new notebook has a wide screen display which, over the week away, I'd rather learnt to like. So, bearing in mind that I spend a lot of time staring at a monitor screen I thought I'd get a new wider one. So I did.

The new monitor has a fantastic, jaw dropping display of amazing quality. Which is just as well, because otherwise I might have chucked it through the window by now. It is a 22 inch HP job, with an HDMI input as well as VGA and a lovely glossy finish. However, it and Vista just don't get on.

I know exactly how this should work. I know because I've read the White Paper "Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) Ver. 1.1" by Yu-Kuan Lin Program Manager, Mobile PC Business Unit. This is well written, comprehensive and has some nice scenarios that explain just what should happen. Essentially, the whole thing has been designed so that you set a monitor up once, Vista remembers that setup and then replicates it each time you plug that monitor in again.

This does not happen.

What happens is that you set it up once, and next time you plug it in the system does what the heck it likes, with a range of implausible and hard to select display options. Should you be stupid enough to let the screen saver kick in it then does something else. And if you are such an idiot as to put the machine to sleep you can look forward to no screen, a black screen with a cursor, a screen that you can't do anything with because the window is on the other screen or the blue screen of death when you come back depending on the whim of the system.

I'm not sure who to blame here. The monitor has the habit of reporting itself to Vista as one of a number of devices. The HP monitor control program refuses to believe that an HP monitor is plugged in. The Nvidia display driver doesn't even let me change options and Vista seems quite happy that nothing is wrong.

As for me, the picture is so good that I'm just about prepared to live with it for now. But I've lost a couple of hours trying to find out why something which should just be plug and play is nothing of the sort.

Update on Monday, November 12, 2007 at 07:04PM by Rob

'tis a driver thing. I've managed to track down a set of NVidia drivers that makes the monitor mostly work.

Comments

[Tom Wardill]

It should just work, but it doesn't.
Try this: http://www.realtimesoft.com/ultramon/
should sort a lot of the problems out, lets you set display profiles that live in the quick menu.
Worth a look.

[Rob]

Yep. I had a look at ultramon and it looked promising. Snag is, I resent paying money to fix something that should just work. I'm going to do some fiddling around and complain to HP (whose fault I think this is).

[Martin Bryant]

I hate Vista. It moves my external monitor from the left to the right, it changes the resolution of my laptop monitor and it changes which is the primary monitor. I didn't ask for any of these things to happen.

If Vista was capable of making the install CDs that I need then I'd remove it until Vista is proven to work well.

I've now installed Ubuntu on my desktop andI'm very happy with that.

I am no longer a Microsoft devotee...

Humph.

[Dimblor]

I'm having similar grief with my dell inspiron 1720 and a HP 1706 external monitor.
I found that there were 10 different monitor configurations stored by TMM
in regedit, you'll find them here:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\TMM\VidList

I deleted alll of the vidlists, and it sorted my problems out... for a while. Then, I closed my laptop lid, and the forgetfulness/randomness of TMM started again.

[Rob]

I tried using the TMM thing to fix things, without much success.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/934552

But I'm in a much happier place now. I've found that later versions of the NVidia drivers make a huge difference to stability and repeatability. I went on to:

http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/

(sadly not live at the moment, but moving to a new server) and got the very latest Forceware, which seems to have sorted things out quite a bit.

[Spyware Blockers]

I have been reading your posts lately, just want to say thanks for all informative stuff i have found here, helped me learn alot lately.

Much Regards, Mark