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Using an external display???

V

v2club

macrumors regular
Original poster
Apr 13, 2011
161
0
I've got some problems using an external display with my 13" MBP

1. The full screen mode won't work when the MPB is connected to the external display, the picture moves back to the MBP and the display does black. (I mean when used as a second display, not when mirroring).

2. Somewhere in the forum I read that when I shut the lid, the laptop won't go to sleep if I'm running Lion but in fact it does go to sleep (again I'm talking when connected to an external display)

3. There seems to be no option to use only the external display, like Windows has.

4. Also there seems to be no option to rescale like Windows has. What is the point of connecting to a bigger display, when the icons, the menus, the buttons and pretty much everything is gonna stay just as small and hard to see as on the 13" screen (and please don't say to watch movies, I've done it and it's awesome, but that's not the point)

If anybody has any solutions to any of my points, please feel free to share.
 
1. Something is wrong, I can have a program full screen on my HDTV when doing extended desktop.

2. I don't know about lion(I hate lion, if there was a stronger word than hate I would use it), but with 10.6 you need to have a mouse or keyboard hooked up to be able to use it in clam shell mode.

3. Set it to mirror the display, then turn the brightness on your laptop all the way down to off.

4. I don't get what you're asking, you can change the resolution of the external display, but I don't think that's what you mean?
 
DWBurke811 said:
1. Something is wrong, I can have a program full screen on my HDTV when doing extended desktop.

2. I don't know about lion(I hate lion, if there was a stronger word than hate I would use it), but with 10.6 you need to have a mouse or keyboard hooked up to be able to use it in clam shell mode.

3. Set it to mirror the display, then turn the brightness on your laptop all the way down to off.

4. I don't get what you're asking, you can change the resolution of the external display, but I don't think that's what you mean?
Click to expand...

Mate since you had nothing useful to say, why did you even bother to replay???


1. Full screen mode is when you can see all your apps Full-Screen, only Lion has it, so if you don't have it, I can't explain it to you!

2. Again since you don't know about Lion, why bother to reply?

3. When I set it to mirror and turn the brightness all the way down to off, the picture of the the external display it's smaller than the screen and in order to fit the screen properly, I have to reduce the resolution from 1080p to 720p, which I don't want to!

4. In Windows 7 (right click on the desktop > Screen resolution > Make text and other items larger or smaller) then you can make everything bigger, without reducing the screen resolution. Unfortunately such option seems to be missing form iOS X Lion!
 
v2club said:
I've got some problems using an external display with my 13" MBP

1. The full screen mode won't work when the MPB is connected to the external display, the picture moves back to the MBP and the display does black. (I mean when used as a second display, not when mirroring).

2. Somewhere in the forum I read that when I shut the lid, the laptop won't go to sleep if I'm running Lion but in fact it does go to sleep (again I'm talking when connected to an external display)

3. There seems to be no option to use only the external display, like Windows has.

4. Also there seems to be no option to rescale like Windows has. What is the point of connecting to a bigger display, when the icons, the menus, the buttons and pretty much everything is gonna stay just as small and hard to see as on the 13" screen (and please don't say to watch movies, I've done it and it's awesome, but that's not the point)

If anybody has any solutions to any of my points, please feel free to share.
Click to expand...

Full screen mode doesn't work on a second display in Lion. Well, you can go into full screen mode, open some palettes and move them to the second display, but that's it.

Your other problems sound like a firmware setting is wrong. I can close my lid and it stays running with the external display. Although i'd rather it behave like yours.

A work around is to close the lid, pull your USB peripherals and reconnect them afte rit has gone to sleep. That will cause it to wake up again.

You can also search for firmware settings to affect sleep behaviour.
 
1. It is because Lion's fullscreen nonsense came broken. It is an Apple thing to release stuff broken nowadays. The App is supposed to use everything when in fullscreen including the space on the other screen. Apple just forgot that that isn't useful in quite many situations and they jsut don't give you an option you change it. One reason to hate Lion.

2. Afaik it shoud go to sleep. If you want it to enter clamshell mode and use the external screen with mouse and ext. keyboard. You need to wake it up again. Every little USB interrupt works unfortunately. Click the mouse, hit any key. I hate it that it always enters clamshell when I close it before I remove my charging iphone. Remove the damn phone and it enters clamshell. Unfortunately it doesn't know if the ext. screen is off.

3. see 2.

4. OSX offers no such thing. There is a double DPI option in Lion now afaik, but that is overkill naturally. Apple doesn't offer it live with it. Unfortunately OSX multi monitor support is quite limited compared to Windows.
 
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