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I recently purchased two new dual monitors. I interchangeable swap laptops -- one for work, one for personal use.

The personal use laptop is a lenovo Y500 and I use the ports, HDMI and VGA to connect to my monitors. I followed the instructions about setting my laptop settings to "do nothing" when lid is closed and I even set the sleep settings to "do nothing". So, my lenovo Y500 works great and when I close the lid on my laptop, I have a primary and secondary monitor show up on the two monitors I purchased and all is well.

However, even though I did the same for my work laptop Lenovo W530, it doesn't work. The lenovo W530 has the ports MiniDisplay port and VGA. I made my VGA primary and my minidisplay port secondary. When I close the lid on my work laptop, the primary screen (VGA) is black but I can see and move my cursor on the screen but nothing happens. Also as if my laptop is permanently in sleep mode but awake? The secondary monitor when the lid is shut does not work or detect the minidisplay port.

It's just black and I can't move my cursor to the screen. It's just not detected. The interesting thing is when my work laptop screen is not closed, the primary monitor is displayed as secondary and it's detected and functional. It's only when the lid is closed that the primary and secondary monitors have problems.

What is wrong? Is there a problem with the miniDisplay Port? (I'm using my bf's thunderbolt minidisplay port connected to a HDMI cable that connects to my monitor). Also if that's the case, then what's wrong with the primary monitor with VGA? Why is it not functional?

What is interesting is that when I disconnect my miniDisplay Port on my work laptop (with it's lid closed), the primary monitor is no longer black with a visible cursor. It fully displays my work laptop screen properly. It seems to be an issue with the incompatibility of the miniDisplay port > mDP to HMDI converter > HDMI cable to monitor. Should I get a new one? Is it regarding analog vs. digital problem?

The monitors I'm using are an an Asus VN248. (They come with two HDMI ports and a VGA port each).

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  • does your laptop support both hdmi and vga at the same time? I don't think so!
    – Erdem Ece
    Dec 28, 2013 at 12:29
  • What do you mean? My work laptop at work has a dual monitor setup. So, it should support multiple monitors. The only ports on the laptop are VGA And mini display on the work laptop. I'm not sure what they're using to hook up the mini display port though. Should I be using a different adapter? Like a mini display to VGA?
    – Kala J
    Dec 28, 2013 at 14:53

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