[AJFenix]

I bought the 30'' samsung SyncMaster 305T monitor. My XPS laptop has a Geforce Go 7950 GTX , which has DVI-D (Dual Link), which is what the monitor requires. I have windows Vista home premium edition. It plugs in fine and in the nVidia control panel it is being read as what it is (Syncmaster , and my laptop monitor is being read correctly as well). However, in the normal DIsplay Config where you change your resolution, and in the device manager, both screens are read as "Generic PnP monitor".

The Samsung, when I turn on extended desktop or dualview / clone, the samsung instead of displaying the appropriate image just runs through its color test, changing colors every second from blue, red, green, etc. Everyone said the monitor should be compatible, and I had a dell guy remotely connect and mess around with the diff settings. He said he showed it working on my end. I called samsung and there arent really drivers for the monitor that they have, and that windows would have them if they did because they are the ones that create them. I was unable to find anything relevant in that regard, though.

My assumption is that Vista for some reason doesn't recognize the monitor properly and that is why it wont work. I doubt anything is wrong with the monitor itself, and it should be compatible with this laptop. Ive read in more than one spot that Vista reads monitors as generic pnp and gives bad resolutions (like the max this allowed was 20xx instead of 2560 or so) whereas windows XP would detect it correctly (but shouldn't it still at least display something instead of just changing colors?) and it would work under that, so I've maybe considered installing XP as a dual boot thing. I'm not sure, but I really want to get this monitor working, and I'll be very thankful. Sorry if some of that wasnt coherent. Feel free to reply here or PM me, thanks.

edit: No reward threads in CTH. -Sam