Connect a laptop to an external display
- Turn off the laptop or put it into sleep mode.
- Connect the laptop to an AC power source. It should be connected to AC power whenever you are planning to use an external display.
- Turn off the external display.
- Prepare the external display, hooking up the cabling and power connectors it needs to operate.
- Hook up the external display's video cable to the laptop's output port. There are Laptop display adapters that let different models of PowerBooks and iBooks hook up to external displays.
- Turn on the external display.
- Turn on or wake the laptop. The laptop should detect the presence of the active external display and will try to adjust its display settings to use that display. If your external display does not natively support the same resolution as the laptop's internal LCD display, your internal screen may blank out or change to a different resolution (with a wide black border). You may also need to adjust the refresh rate; you may see the best results if you begin with a 60 Hz frequency.
- Turn on Video mirroring or Video spanning, if desired, and if your laptop model supports it. If your laptop last used an external display in video mirroring mode, it will generally attempt to use video mirroring again the next time it is connected to an external display.
Section:
Keywords: display, laptop computer, mac os 8, mac os 9, mac os x, presentation graphics, troubleshooting
Question: How do I connect a Macintosh laptop, such as an iBook or PowerBook, to an external display, like a classroom projector?
FAQ item: true
Score: 500
