Connecting a laptop to an HDTV - Having issues..

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Hello.

I am trying to connect my Gateway M-1615 laptop to my HDTV via HDMI, but I'm having issues.

No matter what settings I set the resolution to, the TV cuts out most of the picture. The desktop appears on my TV, but it is extremely zoomed in no matter what resolution I use.

Any ideas of how to get this working? I'm pretty much stumped.
 
Is your TV FullHD or only HDReady?
 
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Not sure what GPU means. I don't know what's controlling the scaling. It seems to change every time I change the resolution in the display settings on the laptop, but none of the resolutions work properly.

The TV is full HD. It's a 42" LCD TV with 2 HDMI ports, etc. It plays most things in 1080p.
 
Fluent, I don't know what kind of TV you have but my HD tv has a button called view mode where I have 4 options to change the size of the picture and has nothing to do with the resolution. I use it a lot when I watch football and the scores are all hidden at the bottom. The settings are:Zoom-S-Stretch,dot bydot and stretch.

There are other settings usually in your remotes menu.
 
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Not sure what GPU means. I don't know what's controlling the scaling. It seems to change every time I change the resolution in the display settings on the laptop, but none of the resolutions work properly.

The TV is full HD. It's a 42" LCD TV with 2 HDMI ports, etc. It plays most things in 1080p.

GPU= graphics processing unit. Your video card. Being that its a laptop it's most likely integrated. If its amd/ati they are notorious for overscan problems although it can happen on nvidia or intel also.

Anyway make sure you have the latest drivers, then go to your graphics settings. You should have an option to adjust for overscan. Also should give you the option to output to monitor or HDTV.

Also some tv's have different setting modes such as auto,HDTV and pc. So check your tv settings also.
 
My video card is an integrated ATI card. I don't have any option to adjust for overscan though, not that I can see anyway.

But I will download the latest drivers and try again. I got the VGA output to work perfectly.
 
Not sure which drivers he using but here's a tutorial to change overscan.

http://http://techhelpbot.com/content/how-change-options-ati-radeons-overscan-or-underscan

If you have different driver and CCC version just do a quick google search on how to change overscan settings for your version. I no longer have an ati card so I can't tell you exactly where it is but I know it's there.

Also the overscan problems have mainly affected the hdmi out so VGA working fine makes sense.
 
Ugh. Thanks for the link, but the only scaling options present in my version of CCC (which I just downloaded from the official Gateway drivers section), only has 2 options -

1 - scale to full size
2 - center

Option 2 at least gets a decent picture but it's small and centered in the middle of the screen.

Then, the highest resolution possible is only 800x600. Ridiculous. No matter what I can't change the resolution, even my laptop reverts to 800x600.

Annoying to say the least. VGA option is okay but it reverts my laptop to 1024x760, which is not optimal performance. The screen on the TV looks nice at that point though.

I'm sure this all has to do with this POS laptop I'm using. It likes to shut off automatically and everything I've ever tried to use it for has been a hassle so this is no surprise.

Thanks for your help though, much appreciated.
 
If you are connecting via HDMI the videocard should detect the resolution of the "external" monitor, right in the regular display control panel for windows (not in CCC).

But integrated graphics isn't going to cut it likely.

The GPU needs the juice to push the pixels. Most low end laptops with Intel integrated graphics (or the "C" series AMD processors) lag and tear badly with HD. I have an Acer with a C-70 "HD" graphics option but like I said it is just an integrated graphics card, can't handle the image at all. Stutters, lags etc.

It doesn't take *much* to drive the panels however, I have a Sony VPCSC with a dedicated 6570M and it drives my 1080P Samsung 43 inch all the time.
 
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A bit off topic:
The newer AMD low cost notebook chips support some special hardware video acceleration in the GPU (whatever the specific term is). So they can output 1080p fluently via HDMI if the video uses one of the supported codecs and if the software player supports it too.
 
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