This black friday I bought a 22" widescreen LCD monitor. It was a Samsung 2232GW. I connected it using the DVI cable which came with it,  to my laptop bay. I was hoping to get a high resolution  display without any headaches. Well, these days none of the electronics work that way.

 My laptop was a Toshiba Tecra M5 with Windows XP professional. 

My problem was that the display on the new Samsung widescreen LCD monitor wasn't going up above the resolution of 1280x1024. In the display settings drop down list,  there were no options beyond 1280x1024. I tried reinstalling the Monitor drivers, and it didn't work. The samsung driver installation confuses you with multiple options, and it is not very helpful.  I found that my laptop was using a Mobile Intel 945 Express chipset. I had also downloaded and reinstalled the latest display driver for  from the intel site. Na, na, it wasn't still working. I wouldn't get any listing above 1280, and also display looked odd. After 1 hour of Googling, I hit a page which talked about upgrading the BIOS. My Tecra bios version was 1.3.  You can locate the BIOS version without rebooting by navigating to   Start >All Programs>Accessories>System Tools>System Information. The Toshiba site for Tecra M5,  lists Version 3.3 of BIOS. Mine was version 1.3. I downloaded and installed it using the windows option. One has to be careful about the BIOS version and see that it matches the  laptop part no for tecra m5. The site lists two versions of BIOS 3.3, one starting with a part no of  PTM51U and the other with PTM50U. The part no. identification is located on the back of the laptop. After upgrading the BIOS and rebooting the laptop, I was able to configure the Samsung display correctly. I also found a few things like extended displays.

 I could not find any documentation on how to configure this, and hence the this blog..

 After using the big screen for a few days, I could not help adding this... With me moving into my mid forties and refusing to accept a pair of glasses, this might be the one little toy which can push out your plans to decorate your face.  The 22" display with its high resolution, brightness and clarity makes reading fine print more easy. Letters  stand out more larger and clearer.