Acer notebook and Dell projector compatibility

Hard to answer without being there but right click on your desktop and select "Properties". Select the "Settings" tab and see if you can select the Dell projector as one of your monitors.

Oh, welcome to A2K also.

Thank you. I will try that as soon as I get home. The projector has always worked with any of our other laptops, so this really had me stumped. Someone else had told me it might be a resolution setting that needed to be changed. Thanks for replying so quickly and welcoming me. I do appreciate any and all help.

Various brands of laptops handle the "VGA out" part of the system differently. Some (like my Dell) have a function key that toggles the external video out. This is usually changed by holding down that key that is marked "fn" or something denoting "function" and another key. On my Dell if I remember correctly it was function + F3.

As you toggle through that special function key you will be switching the laptop to either:

Internal screen only (only the built in laptop screen is activated and the external VGA port is disabled)

External screen only (the built in laptop screen is turned off and only the external VGA port is activated)

Or Both (both internal and external vga ports are activated)

On some laptops, while you are in the posting part of boot up (before Windows starts) both VGA ports are automatically activated. As soon as Windows is booted however the VGA settings revert back to how-ever you last had it configured. It sounds like you simply need to find and toggle the external VGA video output to being on.

Your projector is usually also configurable in that it has several input sources. Usually a VGA (PC) input, composite, S-Video and sometimes Component) Most projectors are factory set to "auto seek" for an active input. Or you can set it manually to always and only use a specific input port.

The reason you see the "posting screens" on the PJ is because of what I mentioned earlier. That being most laptops post with both the internal screen and the exteranal VGA enabled but then default to the Windows defaults once Windows starts.

Resolution is usually auto-adjusted by most projectors to at least give you some kind of video, which you can later adjust to display properly. But I've not seen resolution of the laptop cause a complete shutdown of the VGA output port. I could be wrong there, but have never seen that as a problem myself. Good luck. - Rich

Thank you very much. I did try what was offered earlier and was not able to fix our problem. I will try this tomorrow. It really sounds like what this problem may be. I do appreciate all of those that do offer help in any form.