Hi all,
I've unlocked the BIOS on my Dell Vostro 3450 (Version A11-mod) and would like some help/advice selecting the proper settings for what I want to do.
The internal display is badly damaged and basically unusable so the laptop lives attached to an external monitor/kbd/mouse. This works fine as long as I'm booted into an OS. But when I want to change operating systems (I maintain several on this machine), I need to open the lid and press Fn+F1 in order to display the boot manager on the external monitor. Doing this several times a day quickly becomes tiresome - and I still can't see the entire OS boot sequence on the external display.
I'd really like to completely disable the internal display and direct all graphical output through the VGA port to the external monitor. Once I unlocked the BIOS, I saw several options under Advanced/System Agent/Graphics that looked promising but everything I tried either did nothing or resulted in boot hanging at POST (Dell splash screen).
There must be some way to accomplish this seemingly simple objective. Has anyone here done this or knows enough about the various settings to make an educated guess? Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
(this machine does not have the switchable graphics, only the onboard Intel HD 3000 graphics)
I've unlocked the BIOS on my Dell Vostro 3450 (Version A11-mod) and would like some help/advice selecting the proper settings for what I want to do.
The internal display is badly damaged and basically unusable so the laptop lives attached to an external monitor/kbd/mouse. This works fine as long as I'm booted into an OS. But when I want to change operating systems (I maintain several on this machine), I need to open the lid and press Fn+F1 in order to display the boot manager on the external monitor. Doing this several times a day quickly becomes tiresome - and I still can't see the entire OS boot sequence on the external display.
I'd really like to completely disable the internal display and direct all graphical output through the VGA port to the external monitor. Once I unlocked the BIOS, I saw several options under Advanced/System Agent/Graphics that looked promising but everything I tried either did nothing or resulted in boot hanging at POST (Dell splash screen).
There must be some way to accomplish this seemingly simple objective. Has anyone here done this or knows enough about the various settings to make an educated guess? Any help or advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
(this machine does not have the switchable graphics, only the onboard Intel HD 3000 graphics)