I have a laptop and the monitor died. So I plugged in an external monitor and a strange thing happens. When I try to watch some embedded (but not YouTube) videos it suddenly goes full screen and I cannot access any controls and cannot escape out and when it finishes it doesn’t revert back and the only thing I can do is reboot the computer. It never did that when using the laptop’s monitor. Examples of videos this happens with are CrooksandLiars.com, the embedded ones (as opposed to the downloadable ones).
I used to get this on one of my old laptops, and I know other people get it as well. It was one of the Desktop properties. If you right-click on the desktop and click the “settings” tab, one of the buttons there changes the “mode” of the screen display. I don’t have that particular laptop now, so I can’t be more specific. I can’t even remember the make. It was a hardware-specific thing. Some games used to trap the display, and I learned to fix it. Then on customer’s sites I found that they had laptops doing the same thing after particular (work!) applications.
So, I’m playing around with the various things one can explore in the Right click—Properties—Settings area, and I found a tiny drop down menu that allowed me to select the external monitor, and when I did that a little box appeared that said, ‘Extend desktop to monitor’ and I clicked that with a ‘Let’s see what THIS does’ attitude and it blew up my desktop and all my icons were gone and there was no task bar, and when I right clicked to get back to settings, the menu never showed up and I’m thinking, ‘Oops’. My wife said that happened to her once and she went fishinig off the screen with the mouse and grabbed the Settings box and could fix it. So for a half an hour I’m fishing and fishing and (much like happens to me in real life fishing) nothing. So I unhook the computer and hook up another monitor and System Restored (the greatest invention in computerdom) and voila, fixed.
So the lesson is, never, ever, click the box ‘Extend desktop to monitor’ unless accompanied by a geek. It should come with a warning sticker.
You can toggle your laptop/monitor display with on a Dell. Some other hardwares use different keys. They do actually mention these things on the properties box. Only geeks read them…
“Extend desktop to Monitor” means that
the left half of the desktop is on the laptop
screen and the right half is on the monitor.
So, if your laptop screen was working, you’d
see that if you take your mouse and move
it past the right edge on the laptop, you’d
suddenly see the mouse appear from the left
edge of the monitor.
When you brought up the screen properties
window, it showed up on the part of your
desktop that should have been shown on
the laptop screen.
What you had before was that your desktop
was doubled, the same thing shown on both
the laptop screen and the monitor, which is
what you want.
I’m not sure what’s going on with those
embedded videos, though. What’s the model
of your laptop?
Most laptops I own, including my current ones, have a little blue screen icon on the right side of the task bar. Clicking on that yields some menus, one of which instructs the computer to display to an external monitor, or the laptop screen, or both.
Well I’m all hooked in to a pretty decent 17" Dell monitor that someone gave me for free and it works fine so I’m not touching a thing. I got behind on a bunch of stuff while it was down and I don’t need that again.
