The Mindful Coder

Code, yes. But think about it a little first.

Archive for the ‘external monitor’ tag

External Display Issues on MacBook Pro with Win 7 or Vista 64bit

6 comments

I finally installed Window 7 via bootcamp after trying it out as a VM on my MacBook Pro for a month.

First of course I had to get around theridiculous restriction placed by Apple that bootcamp can be used only if the primary HDD is unpartitioned and is a single logical drive. WTF? How retarded is that? I tried to get clever by partitioning the mac primary partition *after* creating a bootcamp partition and installing Windows. If you do that, bootcamp stops recognizing your Windows partition. Messed up and idiotic but it’s not like Apple is known for listening to users. Anyway, I digress.

So, after I got on Win 7 via bootcamp, my Dell external display wouldn’t work. If I unplugged and plugged it back in via the mini display port, it would get recognized but try as I might, it would not allow me to duplicate or extend my display to the external monitor.

I guessed this was an issue with the nvidia drivers (nvidia GEForce 9600M GT). To fix the issue, download the latest Vista 64bit drivers from nvidia here.

Works just fine after a restart. If your monitor is not recognized even after a restart, unplug and plug it back into the mini-display port.

Note that this fix is for Win7 64bit. I don’t know if the same issue exists for Win7 x86. I would be interested in hearing back from you guys if you found the same issue on Win7 x86 or Vista.

Written by The Fat Oracle

January 19th, 2009 at 12:59 pm