How to set up mirror display in Windows 7

[laughnote]

Hello,

I have a Dell Inspiron laptop that is running windows 7 home premium. I'm trying to set up an external monitor to mirror my laptop monitor, but all i can get it to do is set up the external monitor as a dual monitor. I want to connect the flat screen monitor to my laptop and have it display the same screen that I'm seeing on the laptop. Anyone know how to set this up in Windows 7?

 

[arson94]

I'll tell you what I know. From previous experience, I have seen situations where there wasn't an option to do this and I could never find out why and ended up having to use the video card's driver software. Either way, under

"Control Panel\Appearance and Personalization\Display\Screen Resolution"

you should have a drop down menu by the field 'Multiple Displays' with an option to 'Duplicate These Displays.' That's the option you'd want to select.

But, like I said, that option doesn't exist sometimes for whatever asinine reason I could never discover. So, going through Nvidia Control Panel or ATI Catalyst Control Center was the only way I could get it to work.

Also, laptops are sometimes a different a story. Many times laptops require you to use their version of your video chip's driver software package since they usually add in other supported funtions of their hardware and this hardware and accompanying functions aren't supported in the drivers you would download from ATI/AMD or Nvidia. In such a case, you'd probably have to use whatever software the laptop vendor has to manage mutiple monitors. I'm not sure what Dell's software is called but I know Lenovo's software is called Presentation Director. See if you can find Dell's software to manage displays and give it a shot.