How can I reset external monitor settings?


Hello everyone!

I find myself in a very frustrating predicament. Yesterday I tried
connecting my laptop to my 46" Samsung TV (LN46A650) using a top-end VGA
cable, and it worked beautifully out-of-the-box. I was able to get a
resolution of 1280 x 768 mirrored, and, more importantly, 1920 x 1080
when using only the external monitor. It looked gorgeous, and I
should've left well enough alone. Unfortunately, I started to experiment
with different resolutions, extended desktops, etc. I don't know exactly
what I did, but the end result is that I can no longer get the "external
monitor only" mode! When I try to switch to that mode, either by
pressing Fn-F8, or through Windows Mobility Center, or through nVidia
control panel, the resolution gets reset to 800 x 600, and image is
displayed on BOTH the laptop and the TV.

I spent about 3 hours last night trying to fix this problem. I tried
logging out, restarting the computer, turning off the TV, disabling
Transient Multimon Manager (TMM) and restarting, and uninstalling the
monitors from the Device Manager. The latter automatically reinstalls
the monitors and gives me the "New Display Detected" screen, but the
"Show my desktop on the external display only" option is grayed out:

[image:
http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/~abramovo/external_only_greyed_out.jpg]


So, I'm left wondering if it's possible to reset external monitor
settings to "factory defaults" to get the "external monitor only" 1920 x
1080 mode working again. After all, IT WORKED BEFORE, until I started
messing around. Where are the settings for external displays stored,
anyway? Is it a Vista thing, an NVIDIA thing, a Dell thing, or some
bastardized combination of the three? Please help!

P.S. Unfortunately, I did not have System Restore enabled, so rolling
back is not an option.

Hardware/software: Dell Precision M6300 laptop with an NVIDIA Quadro FX
1600M video card, running Vista Business 32bit. Updated with all the
latest drivers.


--
agaethwe
.