Dell LCD Monitor erractic when connected to HP notebook

[librehombre]

I have a 19" Dell E193FP LCD monitor connected to my HP ze5730us notebook. Sometimes this mashup works and is stable, but oftentimes, the sync gets out of whack and both monitors just blink on and off. I futz around with the controls of the Control Panel/Display app and if I am really lucky something snaps into place and both displays are stable.

I also have my keyboard attached to the notebook and a floppy disc USB external drive. I have tried reinstalling the Radeon driver to no avail, but I have not checked their web site for an updated driver. Or, HP's.

When I go into the System/hardware/device Manager for the Dell monitor I don't see a way to direct the process out on the web to the appropriate Dell web page for the driver. I thought this was the process for updating drivers. Has it changed?

Any advice is most appreciated.

Writchey

 

[Tmagic650]

Your Dell monitor should work fine with the HP laptop. All LCD monitors run at 60Hz vertical refresh. Since the HP laptop screen is an LCD you should be ok. You might try going to HP's support site, and update the laptops video driver from there:

http://welcome.hp.com/country/us/en/support.html

Don't go to Dell, there is no need

 

[librehombre]

thanks for the info. I did a more careful check of the installed radeon driver and determine that whatever I thought I was doing when I said I installed the latest driver, I was wrong. The driver date was 2002 and the latest driver on the Radeon site turned out to be 2004. So, I installed the 2004 driver. It seemed to fix the problem, but now at times when I reboot or the screen saver turns off and then one again, there go my displays. I thought it might have something to do with running in 32 bit color mode so I changed to 16-bit. No permanent fix there either. I have discovered that my building power is 130 volts instead of 120. Is it possible this is the problem?

 

[AlbertLionheart]

The voltage being 10% out could be the cause but this would be more likely if it was 10% down and an error in the cycles per second rate as this would effect the refresh rate. These voltage values would not effect the laptop as it is powered through the external PSU.
I would be more inclined to blame the graphics card in the laptop - the easiest way to check is either to take the laptop somewhere else and plug another monitor into it, or connect another monitor where you are now.

 

[librehombre]

Thanks for the tip. Don't have another monitor, but perhaps I can find a friend willing to let me experiment.