XP: How to change display settings for normal mode from VGA mode?

XP: How to change display settings for normal mode from VGA mode?

"I have a self-installed Lenovo T500 laptop. Yesterday, I tried plugging in my LG monitor and changed two things:
- I extended the desktop to it so that I could see two documents side by side.
- I selected the 3rd monitor in the combo box located between the picture of the screen and the resolution slider, which funnily showed no name for the display driver (so the caption was something like ""Plug and Play Monitor with"")"

Asked by: Guest | Views: 482

Total answers/comments: 1

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Guest [Entry]

"I finally fixed the problem by tweaking the registry directly. As always, be very careful when modifying the registry. Or as they say: ""Kids, don't try this at home"".

After looking through the registry searching for ""extend"" or ""desktop"", I finally found a value called ""Attach.ToDesktop"". Over on StackOverflow there is a question which seems to imply that this value corresponds to the ""Extend the desktop to this monitor"" setting in the display properties.

There were several copies of this value, but one was under a key called

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Hardware Profiles\0001\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\IALM

Deleting all instances of that key solved the problem. I rebooted, and my display now works again.

Indeed, googling a bit more, I found out this had to do with Intel. I first try to reset (some) of those values to 0 and rebooted, but it didn't work, so I decided to delete it altogether, hoping it would re-create nice default values. It did."