Computer not detecting second monitor?

[carysmarie]

Okay so I'm going to be talking in VERY simple language here since I'm not as computer savvy as I like to say I am!

Basically I decided to add a second monitor to my computer, since I'm always flicking between windows and we had a spare in the house. Boy it was not as simple as I thought it would be!

On the back of my computer, my main monitor was plugged into a blue horizontal port near the bottom with a small icon of what looks like a monitor next to it. Further up the computer, near the top of the box, there is another port that looks exactly the same - still blue, still with the icon next to, just this one is vertical instead. I plugged the new monitor in. Nothing.

I have switched the plugs around and now the new monitor is working and the old one isn't...what I gather is that the top port (the vertical one) isnt working. Any ideas? TIA.

Edit: I have gone into display settings and pressed Detect but its not finding anything. All I can think of is that the port isn't working. Is there an adapter I can get for this?

 

[Celery]

How about in your BIOS? Have something to enable in there?

 

[carysmarie]

I read that I might have to change something there but cannot get into BIOS in the first place! It says to press the delete key and thats what I'm doing...no luck!

 

[~Darkseeker~]

From your descriptions of horizontal and vertical, the horizontal one at the bottom is your graphics adapter, the vertical one is on-board.

most of the time, you can't use both. using a Graphics card will disable the onboard video.

VGA is old school anyway (guessing you're using VGA since you said the plugs were blue) and I strongly advise anyone to move away from it, even DVI is a world better. Sometimes boards without on-board graphics or that pre-date graphics capabilities included on CPUs will have VGA on board, because Windows natively contains VGA drivers and you can use it to build/image/whatever a PC.

You may need to think about changing the graphics adapter if it only has one usable video-output on it.

Random pic pulled from google and doodled on to illustrate what I said:-

To asses your requirement, what size monitors are you using? VGA only really supports 1200ish by 720ish before you start seeing tearing and flickering because it can't keep up with the data rate.

 

[cb600fshornet]

I think Darkseeker has hit the nail on the head with his answer, what other ports are at the bottom of the PC next to the lower blue (VGA) port? You might need an adapter for another monitor.