Back from Fry’s with a fat, shielded SVGA cable for a Samsung SyncMaster 2333HD connected to my ThinkPad SL400. As it turns out, the old cable was not the cause of the distortion, the moving patch of blurriness that wouldn’t go away. If I tuned the blurry patch sharper with the “Coarse/Fine” controls, non-blurry areas lost clarity. Samsung’s “auto adjustment” didn’t help either. Blurriness bad enough to get me in the car to Fry’s ASAP.

I incorrectly surmised the problem was the cable, as I was using a more-shielded cable before discovering I had enough video memory to use both screens at the same time.

In other words, if I turn off the ThinkPad’s 14″ LCD (in Fedora’s “Configure Display Preferences”) the Samsung external display is dramatically sharper, text is more legible. I assume it’s a power issue–because the SL400 seems to have enough video memory. Just not enough juice to sufficiently power both LCDs simultaneously. Is this a Lenovo-specific issue or specific to the Intel GMA 4500MHD? If you’re curious, here’s what I get with “/sbin/lspci” at the command prompt:

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)
00:02.1 Display controller: Intel Corporation Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 07)

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