My $12 VGA splitter finally made dual monitors work on a 2004 ThinkPad

I bought this no-name VGA splitter off eBay last month just to mirror a laptop screen for a presentation. Turns out it actually let me extend the desktop, which I didnt think was possible without a fancy dock. The catch was the refresh rate dropped to 60Hz and both screens flickered for the first 10 minutes. After messing with the resolution settings for an hour, it settled in and now I use it daily for spreadsheet work. I guess I never trusted these cheap splitters, but this one proved me wrong. Anyone else had luck with random video adapters that shouldnt work but do?

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1 Comment

eric5403d ago

The part about it letting you extend the desktop is what caught my eye. A plain VGA splitter just copies the same signal to two screens, it doesn't have the hardware to make the computer see them as separate displays. More than likely what happened is the laptop's GPU finally kicked in with its own dual output support, and the splitter was just carrying one of those signals. My old Dell from that era needed a specific driver update to do that trick, so it might be worth checking if that's what really fixed it for you.