Re: Connecting External Display Safely to Laptop

On Fri, 01 Jun 2007 06:49:20 -0700, wm_walsh@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Hi!

I may be tempting fate, but when I want to use an external
display with my laptop, I just plug it in the VGA connection
without putting it in standby.

In older laptops, the external display might not be "noticed" until
you restarted. Today's systems will usually notice a monitor shortly
after you attach it and go to enable it. In the odd event that the
monitor wouldn't be noticed, nVidia provides a monitor detection
button in their control panel. ATI probably has something similar.

If there's still something on your secondary display when you remove
it (like a secondary desktop) then there is some risk of "losing"
windows open only on that desktop. But that's really only a problem if
you're doing something like spanning your desktop with DualView, which
my Latitude D800 wouldn't let me do without some twiddling of the
drivers.

I do the same thing when I disconnect it. If I am extending
my display to the external monitor, I do disable that
before disconnecting the monitor.

It wouldn't hurt anything to take the extra time and make sure the
display is off. If you've never noticed problems, though, there is
probably no reason to change what you are doing.

Any potential for damage, or is this OK?

I'd tend to say it is OK, with only a very, very minimal chance for
damaging anything. As far as parallel and serial ports go, I've
disconnected and reconnected them "hot" many times over the years. and
never caused any damage...maybe some confusion on the part of the
software running at the time, but that was it.

(PS/2 and mouse ports seem a little riskier to hot plug or unplug.
I've never killed any hardware doing that either, but you must make a
good connection immediately and some operating systems really don't
like it anyway.)

William

Thanks for your input. I feel better about being able to "hot plug
in" my laptop to monitors. Very convenient.
.

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