I have this thing about collecting damaged items. I need to get better about not doing it because I usually just end up with a load of junk that I’ll always just have good intentions for, but never the time to do anything with it.
Click here to just skip all this and go straight to the solution
This time my habit is paying off for a friend. I picked up a nice Toshiba laptop that had been stepped on by a family’s giant St. Bernard and crushed the LCD screen. Reason #321 to not have a dog. The laptop works fine if you plug in an external monitor and basically use the laptop as a desktop machine.
A friend of mine’s computer went out and now they need a replacement, but just don’t have the money to buy a replacement at this point. They have the monitor, keyboard and mouse from their desktop computer that they can plug into this laptop and have everything they need.
So, I’ve been doing a clean install and update of everything for them, but ran into issues on some reboots where the laptop just would not boot-up and push the default display to the external monitor so I could see what was going on.
The Solution
I finally found the solution online at this website.
With the external monitor connected, boot into safe mode, then disable the display adapter (in device manager). Reboot (with the external monitor STILL connected), and allow Windows to boot normally. Hopefully, you should now have a display on the external monitor.
You see the other tips just had you use the default function keys to cycle through the display options and push the display to the external monitor. Since I was in the middle of loading drivers and other OS updates, the function keys or other methods of using the keyboard to change the settings blindly were of no use.
The solution above worked like a charm and now I’m back in and downloading the second round of over 100+ updates to the operating system.
Wish me luck.