[SOLVED] Monitor won’t turn on

[MattP007]

Hey I have an acer laptop and I’m trying to hook up 2 monitors to it. I have one monitor connected from the hdmi port and I have a vga to dvi cable trying to connect to a asus vg248 monitor but when I plug in the dvi it won’t deliver a signal to display on it.

 

[cryoburner]

That monitor, like most recent monitors, only supports DVI-D, which is a digital connection over DVI, while VGA is an analog connection. Simple adapters and cables that just reroute the wires from VGA to DVI are just connecting the VGA pins to analog pins on a DVI-I connector. The monitor lacks hardware to decode analog signals though, so it can't do anything with those pins, and is only able to utilize digital signals, like DVI-D, HDMI and DisplayPort.

You would likely need an "active" adapter to make that work, that is, one that can take an analog signal and covert it into one of those digital formats before sending it to the screen. It's possible to find active VGA adapters on sites like Amazon for around $10-$20.