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Wormsie

MacBook, External Displays, Sleep Mode

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Hello all,

My adventures in the world of Apple continue. As I have a 19'' widescreen display I'd naturally want to use it with my laptop when I'm at home - so that the main display is on the widescreen and the lid of the notebook is closed. Otherwise I would have bought the display for nothing. :(

Now, as an external display with the main controls in the 13'' laptop screen, everything works just fine. But it's not what I want as it's awkward to have the main windows and toolbar and dock on the smaller screen. So I asked my friend to borrow his Bluetooth Apple keyboard. I first made sure the macbook found the keyboard and then closed the lid. Then I pressed a key on the external keyboard waking my Mac from sleep mode. For a while everything was OK, I could unlock the screensaver on the bigger display and the dock was in its place and the resolution was OK. Then the screen flickered and my Mac crashed. ("It Just Works!")

Are you able to use an external display like that? Somebody said I'd need a dock (or something) but I thought it'd work out of the box. Any tips?

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Reading Apple website, maybe it was just because I didn't have the power cord plugged in. Can anyone confirm?

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The battery going dead sounds like the most likely explanation, unless your MacBook is fucked.

If you want to use your built-in screen but have your dock and menu bar on the external display (as I do—it's handy just to have mail and chat visible all the time and not have to pull them in and out), do this:

Go to Apple>System Preferences>Display. You can then set the arrangement of the screen simply by dragging it around, so one is on the right, left, top or bottom of the other. To change which screen has the main controls on it, simply drag the white bar from one of the little monitor representations to the other on the arrangement. It just works.

EDIT: Also, if you hold command and shift while clicking the thin black dividing bar, you can drag the dock to different sides of your screen. Just a handy tip to know...

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The battery going dead sounds like the most likely explanation, unless your MacBook is fucked.
Hookay :)
If you want to use your built-in screen but have your dock and menu bar on the external display (as I do—it's handy just to have mail and chat visible all the time and not have to pull them in and out), do this:
Yup, I've tried that. It's nice for watching videos etc.

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in the power saving section of ssytem preferences there might be something that prevents it from working like that with no power cord plugged in, check it ooot. I've used my mac like this frequently with no extra things required :)

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It worked!

Perhaps it was the Mighty Mouse or the attached power cord. Didn't want to test. We might never know...

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Man, I love the scroll ball on the Mighty Mouse, but the rest of it is terrible. I wish Apple would release a proper mouse with two main buttons, similar scrolling and two thumb buttons. And decent ergonomics. It'll never happen though, seeing as they still mostly insist on one button being enough with their own products - Mighty Mouse sort of being the exception, but really not.

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Also, I want to make it known that if you play mostly old adventure games, the Mac is a very good choice (as you can install DosBOX and ScummVM on it, and Windows with Boot Camp). I was running GK3 in the highest resolution without any problems. I know, I know, it's age old. But for some people like me that's almost enough.

Additionally I've been able to run Civilization 4 and Age of Empires 3. Civ4 was OK with a the laptop screen and a lower resolution, but when I switched to the bigger screen it started lagging even in the beginning when there's not much to show on the screen. Civ 4 is badly programmed anyway.:violin: I've seen videos on YouTube of HL2 running pretty well.

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