External monitor recognized with wrong resolution ?!?!

(new T61): I've got nVidia 140M, and it recognizes my external monitor Westinghouse L2046NV, but puts maximum resolution 1375x768 or something like that. The monitor native resolution is 1400x1050, which is the same as on my laptop.

So I can't run 1400x1050 on my monitor for some reason . The only time the monitor would work in that resulution is when I run both displays on (laptop + monitor, showing the same stuff), but when I switch only to monitor - same crapy resolution pops up (the one up top).

I tried making my own timing, and that didn't help.

my monitor doesn't come with any drivers, and ran fine on my other laptop with ATI Radeon 345M (like 4 years old laptop). The monitor wizard says it can't find a better match driver than the current one, which displays as plug and play monitor.

What should I do ?

 

"it recognizes my external monitor Westinghouse L2046NV"


But does it recognize the monitor AS A Westinghouse L2046NV?

Usually monitors come with a CD that has little on it beyond a descriptor file describing the monitors attributes. Usually it doesn't mean much except on issues like this. Basically the file names a specific monitor and describes it type and capabilities.

Has that been applied to your Operating system yet?

 

yes, it recognizes it as L2046NV. But the resolution is wrong ..

the monitor came with no drivers what so ever, as it is said to be true plug and play. It even supports DDI

 

I will share my experience with you since I have solved my problem similar with yours. It is up to you whether or not to try my approach.

My T61 has the same nVidia graphics card as yours. After an incident of System Update involving the nVidia graphics card, my Lenovo 19" external monitor went blank because of resolution conflict (worse than your situation).

I explored various options together with an IBM technical support staff over the phone and he finally gave up after 2 hours of trials & errors. He suggested I send my T61 for checking and when I maintained that there was NO hardware problem with my machine, he suggested formatting my harddrive --- that amounted to killing the entire city just because of one culprit in it. I refused to format my harddrive. (That suggestion was gross madness to me.)

I went to "Control Panel" --> "Device Manager" --> clicked on "Display Adapters" --> right-clicked to uninstall nVidia graphics card driver --> selected in the dialogue box to also delete the driver --> my T61 re-booted (with my external monitor VGA plug attached).

This time, my external monitor showed all images / words as "giant" size (as my nVidia graphics card driver was deleted). My T61 automatically prompted that a device was detected without a dirver, and I selected for my T61 to "search" for a driver in the web / internet.

After quite a long while of search and loading --- a new nVidia 140M driver --- my external monitor showed its correct resolution (with another re-boot).

By simply re-loading the nVidia driver without first deleting the existing one will NOT work.

You need to first delete the existing driver and then let T61 find and load a fresh driver that calibrates to the resolution of your attached external monitor. Keep your VGA plug attached to your T61 throughout the process.

(Even though I solved my own problem, that session --- lasted about 3 hours ultimately --- with the IBM technical staff helped me learn other setups possible. Now, I can overcome my problem.)