I am the queen of the computer!

There have been a few milestones in my life lately, and important events when moving house. Gettint on the internet and having the phone connected were both important events. Making the house warm and trying out the washing machine were less exciting but nonetheless things I couldn't do without.

In my previous flat, the other tenant (oh yeah, we happened to be married) set up the computer with all sorts of gizmos and had an extra monitor. The laptop is teeny tiny so using the laptop screen was a strain on the eyes and the keyboard is slightly smaller than a normal one. Since getting a big tv, I've been meaning to recreate this and connect the laptop and external harddrive to the tv so I can surf and watch Smallville on the big screen. This evening, I have succeeded!

All bits talking to each now includes: tv, laptop, modem, external hard drive, wireless thingy, usb port thingy, wireless keyboard, speakers that look like they belong on a spaceship, printer (haven't tested it yet) and gamecube all to my 26 inch tv. The connecting up only took about an hour as fortunately the previous custodian had labelled most of the power plugs and the usb connectors. The thing that took the next two hours was making it output to my tv. I spent about an hour downloading the tv manual (which was useless) to check resolution specs having been googling and reading forums. At first there was no signal to the tv apart from when the laptop started up or shutdown. I think this was solved by changing the resolution. Then I could only see the desktop background and it was sideways. After another hour, the desktop background was still there but in the correct orientation. I then gave in and phoned my dad who didn't know the answer immediately but said enough things to make me feel like trying again.

So here is what I learned:

1) I am connecting my Acer laptop to my LCD tv with a VGA cable (VGA both ends). This has screwing in bits.
2) I went to control panel, display, settings, to discover that the laptop was still setup to have multiple monitors and recognised the tv. I don't know how to set it up from scratch so don't ask.
3) I went to control panel, Intel R Graphics Controller to change the orientation of the picture on the tv.
4) I set the refresh rate to 60HZ and the resolution to 1024 by 768.
5) The final amazing step was to right click the desktop, graphics options, output to, monitor (which I know is my tv). Eureka!

Ok, so not knitting related but may be of interest to you.

Back to knitting content next post as the red hat is just waiting for a bobble.