Once again it is confirmed that my Acer Aspire 8730G laptop sucks ass. I have just moved into a furnished apartment that comes with a Konka LCD-TV, and I figured it would be pretty nice to watch movies on it instead of on the laptop monitor; so I went and bought a standard 5 metre HDMI cable and plugged it into the TV and laptop. Imagine my fury when the TV refused to detect the signal from the laptop. The laptop detected the TV just fine but the TV refused to display anything. I googled, I followed advice, I changed drivers, but to no avail. The TV did not display shit.
In the end I accidentally changed monitor settings to “show desktop only on 2”, where 2 was the TV and 1 was the laptop. Seeing as the TV did not get the signal from the pc (laptop), both the TV AND my laptop monitor now showed black when the HDMI cable was connected and changing drivers did not rollback this setting. At this stage I was totally rabid. And to make things worse, my girlfriend refused to give me the login to her laptop when I texted her about it so I could not try the HDMI cable with hers. I spitted and growled but little did it help.
When she finally came home from work she logged in for me and I tried the cable. And guess what, it worked. Her laptop belongs to the Asus K52J series and it seems a hell of a lot better than mine. What actually happened was that her laptop automatically changed resolution to the native resolution of the TV (1280×720), which appears to be the only resolution the TV could detect as a valid signal.
My laptop has no such automatic resolution feature despite having the most recent NVIDIA drivers installed. I had to change the resolution manually on my laptop to 1280×720, then plug in the HDMI cable and navigate across the TV screen 5 metres away to change the setting back to “extend desktop” so that both laptop and TV would display.
So this is the take home message: when the TV does not detect the HDMI signal from the pc, it is most likely a resolution issue, not a driver issue. Still make sure you have the latest drivers, go to the NVIDIA control panel or Catalyst Control Centre (depending on whether your video card is from NVIDA or ATI) and change resolution on the detected TV to its native resolution. That should sort it.
And if you have problems getting the HDMI audio to work on the TV, it is likely a resolution issue as well. I got the image working on the TV once without the audio functioning and what happened was that I had a 720p movie (which happen to be the TVs native resolution) running on the laptop before turning on the TV and once I turned it on the movie helped the TV detect the video signal but the audio failed to connect. Nevertheless, the audio should work just fine once you set the correct resolution for the TV in the NVIDIA control panel.
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