Videos play fine on my laptop, but do not play when connected to an external monitor (black screen).

Do your videos play fine on the laptop, but when connected to an external monitor like a digital projector, the movie clips (MPEG or AVI) refuse to show the video (they just show a black screen)? If these are the symptoms, you might have a graphics card that is insufficient for running two monitors (the laptop and the external). There are several things you can try to get the videos to play. Try these suggestions below:

• First, try disabling video hardware acceleration. On Windows 2000 or XP, right-click the desktop background and choose Properties. Click the Settings tab then click Advanced. Then click on the Troubleshoot tab. Under Hardware Acceleration, move the slider to the left one notch. Click OK as many times as needed to return to the desktop. Try running the video again. If the problem repeats, try reducing the hardware acceleration more, or set it to NONE.
• Similar to the first suggestion, you can try disabling Hardware Acceleration directly from PowerPoint. Go to Slide Show > Set Up Show, and uncheck the box next to "Use hardware graphics acceleration."


• If those suggestions do not help, you may need to toggle the laptop to display on the external monitor only. You can do this by pressing the Fn key on your keypad, then press the key that toggles your video displays. This is usually a double rectangle symbol. With this method, you will only see the slide show on the external monitor, and the laptop display will be blank. If using Window XP, you should check to see that Slideshow > Set up show > Multiple > Monitors is set to "Primary monitor." This option will be grayed on computers with only one graphics card.
• The last option is to try swapping your Primary and Secondary monitors in your system settings. You may need the external monitor connected to make the change. This can be done by right-clicking on the desktop background, then selecting Properties. Click on the Settings tab. Under "Display", select the external monitor as the primary display. This should swap the 1 and 2 in the graphical display above. Click OK to save the changes.
• If it still doesn't work like you want it to, your video card may be insufficient. You can check your video card settings under the Advanced tab of the Display Properties. You can see the video card and monitor profiles by selecting the Adapters and Monitors tab. You might also try updating your graphics drivers, which should be available from the video card or computer manufacturer's website.

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