Troubles with 2nd Monitor attached to laptop

[DonNagual]

My laptop has a 7800GTX graphics card with DVI-I out. I sometimes like to watch movies at the office with it, and have a 26" wide Dell TV.

The TV works beautifully when I use a normal DVD player or watch TV. But when I try and watch a movie from my notebook to the monitor I have two major problems:

1. The frame rate is horrible. The movies are very choppy.
2. The movie only shows on one monitor at a time. I can not watch the movie on the notebooks 19" widescreen and the 26" Dell TV at the same time. It shows the movie fine on the notebook, but on the TV the movie player (software) screen is blank, no matter what software I try.

I am not so worried about #2, but #1 above is a major one.

Anyone have any suggestions?

 

[Didou]

When you hook up the TV to the laptop, how do you set it up ? As an extended desktop ? Clone image ?

 

[DonNagual]

Clone, with the laptop monitor as the primary monitor.

I have also messed with the screen resolutions, dropping them down below the TV's rating to see if that fixes the problem, and it does not.

 

[Didou]

Have you tried disabling the laptop's screen & only using the DVI output ? I think there's a function key that lets you do that.

 

[DonNagual]

Yes, I have tried that. Same problem happens with the low framerate picture.

Thanks for taking stabs with me though! Appreciated!