Mini Displayport to VGA problem

[Jmay1985]

Hi

Im new to this but I joined as I needed some help with a problem i'm facing when trying to connect my laptop to an external monitor using a mini display port to VGA adapter.

When I try to connect my laptop to my external monitor with the adapter, my external monitor does not detect anything however when I connect to the external monitor with the adapter and the laptop connected with a dvi to hdmi cable the monitor detects the signal. I somehow managed to get to work once but don't know how

The problem i'm facing is that the mini display port to vga connector wont connect to the display on its own it needs the laptop to be connected with the dvi to hdmi cable aswell as the adapter but the hdmi cable needs to be plugged in to the back of my playstation.
My laptop is a Dell Xps 15 with nvidia graphics and intel

Any Help is much appreciated
Thanks
Jhon

 

[asvent]

VGA is analog only and I'm not sure if DisplayPort can do analog and digital, but it's primarily intended for digital. DVI and HDMI (which is just DVI plus audio on a different connector head) can do both analog and digital. So assuming that DP can do analog, you'd probably need to find a way to make the GPU specifically output an analog signal. You'd probably be better off either A) getting a new monitor that can handle DisplayPort or at least DVI/HDMI and using that or B) checking a place like Amazon for an active signal converter, which is what the laptop is doing now. You can't passively convert a digital signal to analog, you need a powered device. Plenty of people will be quite happy to sell you an adapter that just connects the different pins, but it won't do you any good because you're just sending a digital signal over a cable where the device on the other end is going to be expecting analog.

 

[alphanumeric]

VGA is analog only and I'm not sure if DisplayPort can do analog and digital, but it's primarily intended for digital. DVI and HDMI (which is just DVI plus audio on a different connector head) can do both analog and digital. So assuming that DP can do analog, you'd probably need to find a way to make the GPU specifically output an analog signal. You'd probably be better off either A) getting a new monitor that can handle DisplayPort or at least DVI/HDMI and using that or B) checking a place like Amazon for an active signal converter, which is what the laptop is doing now. You can't passively convert a digital signal to analog, you need a powered device. Plenty of people will be quite happy to sell you an adapter that just connects the different pins, but it won't do you any good because you're just sending a digital signal over a cable where the device on the other end is going to be expecting analog.

DVI-I has digital and analog signals, HDMI is digital only by the way. DVI-D is digital only too. I'm not sure about display port. The adapters I've looked at state they convert the signal to VGA so it shouldn't matter. You can't set the video card to output digital or analog to a specific port. The hardware on the card determines if it's DVI-I, DVI-D, HDMI, VGA or Display Port.