Some notebooks allow you to disable the external monitor port as a power saving measure, this might be in the BIOS but usually it will be somewhere in the Power options in the Control Panel. I don't remember seeing it in the bios on Dell's I have fiddled with but then again I havent looked that hard.


Use of the external monitor port is also controlled by a keyboard hotkey, possibly Function + F4; you can just see a symbol a bit like |O| on the appropriate FKey. Successive presses of the key cycles through "Notebook", "Both", "External Only" so don't panic of your notebook screen disappears!

I'd download and install the latest graphics drivers; the XP default ones are very generic.

Dells website is pretty good. The best way to get updates is to use the Service Tag which is somewhere on the bottom of the laptop, usually near the model number. Go to Dells service site (heres the UK one which ought to do:http://support.euro.dell.com/support/downloads/index.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=gen) select "Service Tag", enter your value and hopefully you get to the master page for updates to the laptop. Trawl and select!

Hopefully you will then "Graphics Properties" pages that allow you to define the characteristics of the external monitor. The style used depends on the manufacturer of the graphics chip. The ATI / Radeon method is more intuitive than the "Intel Express Graphics" method (and I'd expect the laptop to have one of these two options) but both do the job. With the Intel drivers theres a "Clone" option; if you want to drive the external monitor at a different resolution to the notebook turn this off!