question for my fellow techs: I have a laptop with an s-video out and the appropriate cable to convert such port to a/v rca. plug it in to the little doohickey that converts rca to coax. I have used this setup before on a diff. tv, but not with the little antenna/rca to coax converter box but instead through a vcr (which is essentially doing exactly the same thing - converting rca to coax) and have watched movies from my laptop on my tv without any problems. but I cannot seem to see anything except for my background of my laptop on the tv now. any idea why? I have toyed with every doggone setting on the vid card of the laptop (res, two monitors vs. default single, etc.) and when I click on the "identify" button, a "1" shows in the center of the laptop and a "2" shows in the center of the tv. I can get that much, but still no source image, icons, or anything else. last night I watched a movie on the laptop screen (still hooked up to the tv for better sound than the laptop has) and when I right clicked on the desktop, - THE CONTEXT MENU WAS ONLY ON THE TV! what the heck is up with that? thanks huge for any help. :) Chuck :) and have a great day!

Make sure "Extend my Windows desktop onto this monitor" is unchecked in the Display properties. 98% of the population is asleep. The other 2% are staring around in complete amazement, abject terror, or both.

"Unchecked"!?!?!?!??? wow. I'll be doggone. really? I never would've guessed that. heh. I'll try that tonight when I get home. thanks! :) I'll post back tomorrow morning when I am back online if it doesn't work. but I have confidence in you Zenith. makes sense now that I think about it. Chuck

Negative Zenith. Didn’t work. I dinked around with it for quite a while last night and still can only get the bg to show up on the TV. When I uncheck the "extend..." checkbox and apply I of course lose the bg on the TV but never can get anymore than just a little signal interruption when I do Function+F5 on my laptop to show on an external vid source. I can see that interruption regardless of what channel the tv and little interface box are set to. (both on 3 or 4 in other words). what else do I need to look at? Any ideas? Does it really matter what the interface box is that I am going through between the laptop and tv? i.e., I have used a vcr before with good luck but don't have one right now to use for this. Just a DVD player sitting on top of a TV - a TV that only has a coax connector on the back. I have to run the DVD through the little coax-rca converter box to play DVD’s and that works just fine. So I am not really sure what to try to change next to get the desktop to the TV instead of just the background. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Chuck