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October 13th, 2020 14:00
Connecting 2 monitors to a Latitude e7270
I have been provided a Latitude e7270 laptop and a monitor from work. The laptop is connected to the monitor via an HDMI cable and all is fine. I am not making use of the display on the laptop. I want to connect a second monitor to the laptop in such a way that I can look at different things on the 2 monitors. I think this is called extended mode. Will I achieve this if I connect the second monitor to the laptop via the Mini DisplayPort (using a Mini DisplayPort-to-VGA cable), and are there any settings I need to address?
If not, how would I achieve this?
Thanks
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jphughan
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October 13th, 2020 20:00
@cudeca Sorry, when I wrote my first reply I missed that you had suggested a Mini-DisplayPort to VGA cable. That would work too, but VGA will look noticeably worse than any other option because it's an analog signal, whereas everything else is digital. If your display has any other input, i.e. DVI, HDMI, or DisplayPort, I would suggest using one of those. A Mini-DisplayPort source port can be used for connecting to any of the display input types I just listed.
jphughan
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October 13th, 2020 20:00
@cudeca Yes you can connect another display to the DisplayPort output and run the external displays independently, i.e. in Extend mode. You could even have the built-in display running at the same time for 3 total displays, all operating independently, if you wanted. You don't need to do anything special other than getting the correct cable. That will depend on the display you buy, but you'll probably want either a Mini-DisplayPort to DisplayPort cable or Mini-DisplayPort to HDMI cable. If your display has both, I'd go with the former. The E7270 can run a display up to 4K 60 Hz from its Mini-DisplayPort output.
Technically you could even run two displays off the Mini-DisplayPort output either by having displays that support daisy chaining or by connecting a DisplayPort MST hub to that output. That could be handy if you ever wanted to run triple external displays (in which case you could NOT keep the built-in display active, since the Intel GPU maxes out at 3 total displays) or if you ever wanted to have both displays connected to a single port on the laptop for simplicity.
cudeca
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October 14th, 2020 08:00
Thank you for replying so thoroughly to my question. The company is balking at providing me with a 2nd monitor because of the cost. These large organizations tend to buy top end stuff and then complain about the cost. I have a spare older monitor that only has a VGA input, so I think I'll try that first. Since I'll be looking at emails and documents, not movies and photos, the images might be adequate. If not, I can always buy a new lower end monitor with a digital input. At worst, I will have wasted a few dollars on the wrong cable.
Thanks again.