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Repair guides and support for the laptop line of Acer's Aspire series for casual home and business use.

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Hard wire laptop to external display

So I have a laptop with a broken screen. I decided to just remove the whole display and use it essentially as a desktop with an external monitor. My problem is that I would like to have 2 external displays but the laptop only has one VGA port. I was wondering if it's possible to somehow hard wire in one display and use the other with the VGA port. I know there are usb to vga converters but would rather not spend the $ and leave the usb port free. Any thoughts or suggestions would be awesome! Thanks for the help

Answered! View the answer I have this problem too

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figure anything out? I too have the same issue

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jeff, I suppose if you would have the schematic, or an oscilloscope, you could try and use the original display connection by soldering a connector to it. All that can turn pretty complicated, since the schematics are not that easy to find, you will furthermore have to make solder connections on the motherboard, and you will need a connector. You also need an LCD display, since you are using inverter and backlight circuits. I would suggest you just repair the original display, it will be cheaper and has a lot less chance of failure. Of course, those are only my 2 cents.

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I was afraid of something like that. Well thanks for the information!

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I’m also in a similar boat as Jeff except my issue is that I wish to install Linux on my Laptop and once the install completes, the screen automatically defaults to the broken LCD panel. In my research, I’ve come across LCD Driver boards for cheap which will essentially allow you to take a working LCD off a laptop and turn it into a display. My question is if there is board which does the opposite? Is there a cheap “driver” board which will connect to the ribbon cable from the Laptop motherboard (where the broken LCD would be plugged in to) and convert the signal to either HDMI, VGA, DVI, etc. so an external monitor can be plugged in and used as the primary display?

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@pmistry not really since you already have all the signals converted that are needed for the LCD panel to function. What keeps you from replacing your display? Any chance of forcing your Linux software to accept an external display as primary? Can you see if your BIOS might have a setting to change primary and secondary display.

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@oldturkey03 I'm finding it difficult to justify the cost (almost $200) of purchasing a new LCD screen for the antiquated laptop of mine! :-) The issue is that when the OS defaults to the broken LCD panel, I cannot see what to do to switch the display to the external VGA port and seeing how there are relatively inexpensive LCD Driver Boards out there, I was just hoping that there would one to do the opposite. From what I'm seeing...no one has come up with one yet. Lastly, the BIOS does not have a setting to allow me to "force" the secondary to become the primary or disable the primary and force the secondary to be active.

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@pmistry what make and model is your Laptop? Maybe we can figure something out

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That would be greatly appreciated @oldturkey03. I have a Compaq Presario 2195CA. Looking forward to seeing your thoughts! :-)

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jeff will be eternally grateful.
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