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I've just bought myself a nice external monitor for my laptop. My laptop's screen has a resolution of 1920×1080. The maximum resolution listed for my graphics card is 2048×1536. However when I plug in the external monitor, it lists resolutions up to 1600x1200, but not 1920×1080. 1600×1200 is no good as it's the wrong aspect ratio. What should I do?

Edit

I'm using Windows 7 x64, the display is a Samsung Lavender P2350

Update

I downloaded and installed the drivers from Samsung (after much grief). The correct resolution is now listed, however if I select it the screen flickers unbearably, it is completely unusable. Any advice?

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fredley
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3 Answers3

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Check the refresh rate of your current graphics card and see if you can improve it. If you can't, it is most likely that you are at the limit of your GPU. It may be a maximum of 2048x1536, but that is for a single screen, not two.

2048x1536 = 3,145,728

(1920 x 1080)x2 = 4,147,200

William Hilsum
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Which laptop do you have, or more specifically, what graphics processing unit does it have?

The reason why you cannot use higher resolutions on your external display is because your laptop's graphics cannot handle so many pixels on two displays at once, either because of a lack of video memory or because the GPU is just not powerful enough.

This also happens with low-end discrete graphics cards and embedded graphics on desktop systems, and even on high-end cards, there is a limit to the display resolutions on multiple displays.

You cold try using lower colour depth to see if it helps, if it is due to a shortage of video memory, rather than processing power.

paradroid
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If you're using VGA then one possible reason is that the cable was broken. I've seen many cases before on some PC, even after updating drivers the problem still appears. Just replace the cable and it's all gone

phuclv
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