bitching and moaning

[baratron]

i dislike pain that doesn't repond to Tramadol. i hope it settles soon. the hospital only want to see me if i have a temperature or other signs of infection.

also, i don't get it - richard plugged the old laptop into the monitor and it displayed immediately. this new one, we've tried everything, even installing new "second display" drivers from the cd that came with the tv, and it won't. i am unsure whether to blame microsoft, sony or samsung. or richard - having bought this vaio because he was impressed with one that one of his cow-orkers has, he JUST remembered that his cow-orker spent an entire day trying to get it to talk to an external display. hrm! and, of course, he rememebred this at 10.40pm, when it was too late to ring said cow-orker to find out what he'd had to do. i wouldn't mind, except i want to play the sims, and the old laptop can't even manage sims 1 anymore.

this is a good post, doing the rounds of my flist. it explains why i can never get involved with someone who isn't already a friend, and why i boggle at people who say they can't possibly date a friend. if you don't already like someone, how can you love them? r was my best friend before we got involved, and he still is. we both think if we no longer had a romantic r'ship, we'd probably still live together.

Comments

[baratron.livejournal.com]

I'm tired and stressed and trying not to be rude, because I do appreciate your help. But you are really on a wild goose chase. It's so not the resolution.

As the second monitor behaves as expected if Windows is booted in Safe Mode, pretty much the first thing we tried was to boot Windows at 800x600, the same resolution as Safe Mode. No dice. Plus, to really prove it's not the resolution - booting Windows in VGA mode (600x480) doesn't work!

If lower resolution, and even lower bit colour doesn't keep the picture, then the key to why Safe Mode does must be that Safe Mode boots Windows with a reduced set of drivers, right? The Vaio has a stupid number of programs that are all competing to control how many monitors are attached: there's the Vaio's own switcher, the nVidia panel AND Windows Control Panel --> Display Settings. 3 separate programs to do one task? Seems very likely to be a conflict - especially as some of these drivers only start up at the point where Windows itself boots. What we need to do is find out which of these drivers are disabled in Safe Mode, and then disable the same one in normal bootup. Except it seems impossible to actually keep any of them disabled.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Disabling the Vaio Event Service solves the problem.

This is somewhat non-ideal, because it loses ALL the function key configs, not just the F7 that was interfering with the nVidia settings - but at least it works :) Stupid Sony, putting in software that conflicts with the hardware...

[aca.livejournal.com]

Now that is odd, since I've gotten the display switching stuff working on vanilla linux kernels without running a service. I could understand the volume and brightness stuff breaking.

Ah well, at least the external display is doing the right thing at this point...

[aca.livejournal.com]

As the second monitor behaves as expected if Windows is booted in Safe Mode, pretty much the first thing we tried was to boot Windows at 800x600

A piece of information you failed to share up to this point, rather leading to the chase of wild geese.

What we need to do is find out which of these drivers are disabled in Safe Mode, and then disable the same one in normal bootup. Except it seems impossible to actually keep any of them disabled.

The vaio's own switcher is done at hardware level, requires no drivers, and meets your needs (cloning). I'd suggest you uninstall the nvidia bits, disable the second display in the windows settings and go from there.

[baratron.livejournal.com]

Nope - I said that Safe Mode works here (http://www.livejournal.com/users/baratron/321689.html?thread=1192857#t1192857) :) Unless you mean the information that it didn't work at 800x600? I tried that as soon as you suggested it might be the resolution - that was how come I was able to state categorically that it wasn't the resolution that was the problem! I took it for granted that you realised I'd tried it, which was why I got annoyed that you kept insisting I should try it... um, crossed wires, or something. (Too much doing tech support for non-geeks?)

It's all irrelevant now, we've got it working. We've got a script to disable the Sony switcher, it's neater to do it that way, as the nVidia controller allows you to do a lot more than straight cloning. Plus we kinda trust it more.