Well, I just spent over 6 hours trying to so something very, very simple: get a widescreen monitor to work with my older Dell Insprion 4150. I'm writing this webpage in hopes that you won't have to go through the same pain as I did.

If you want to skip the fluffy info and want to jump right to the installation, then click here.

  1. A Quick Shout Out

    2. Before I describe exactly how to get this done, a HUGE shout out to PATJE and his/her work on the DH Mod tool V4. Really, that's the full meat of getting this stuff to work; this writing and webpage is pretty much just a keyword wrapper for PATJE's REAL work. If I could have found that page more quickly, I would have been golden.

  2. The Issue

    3. I simply wanted to use a 19" widescreen LCD monitor with my Dell Inspiron 4150 laptop. By default, there were no widescreen resolutions listed by Windows, and after I installed the monitor's drivers, still nothing appeared. I searched the internet, installed all sorts of new drivers, even chatted with DELL customer suppport, and nothing helped me get this to work.

  3. The Solution

    1. Download the latest Radeon (*NOT* Mobility Radeon) drivers from the ATI website (I used these).
    2. Run the executable you downloaded to extract your files somewhere. Make a note of where you extracted / installed those files to. The installation itself will fail. This is expected (the drivers are not appropriate for the Mobility Radeon as they are)
    3. Download the Mod Tool and follow the (simple) instructions. This will MODIFY the drivers for use with the Mobility Radeon!! This step will also install the drivers
    4. After rebooting (or at least, I had to), you'll have the appropriate display resolutions available (such as 1440x900) for running widescreen support. However, IT STILL DID NOT WORK FOR ME! Even if I chose the widescreen resolution, the widescreen output was still just a stretched version of the 4:3 laptop output!!!! So...
    5. Right-click your desktop, choose properties. Click the "Settings" tab and choose the "Advanced" button. You should see a bunch of tabs with little "ATI" icons on them. Choose the "ATI: Displays" tab.
    6. Make sure your "Monitor" and your laptop's LCD are "ON" Here is what it looks like when your monitor is "off", and here is what it looks like when your monitor is "on".
    7. Make your monitor the primary display, and the laptop LCD as the "clone" display. This is what it looks AFTER you do this. Note the small icons below the drawings of a monitor and laptop LCD. The LEFT icon (primary) should be chosen for the monitor, and the RIGHT icon (clone) should be chosen for the laptop. If you want to double-check, right-click either icon and choose "what's this?"

    8. Celebrate--you're done!!

  4. The Binaries

    5. With the internet always in flux, binaries may come and go. Furthermore, I may have used a binary that I thought was unnecessary, but turned out to be necessary. I decided to host all the binaries that I used, including tools that I installed but that I believe were unnecessary. Below is a link to each binary, hosted on my own (slow) server.

    1. R46919.EXE - an old version of ATI MOBILITY RAEDEON drivers that I installed before finding the newer version.
    2. R68764.EXE - the newest version of ATI MOBILITY RAEDEON drivers at the time of my installation. I installed these after installing the older MOBILITY RAEDEON drivers aove.
    3. 6-5_xp-2k_dd_32464.exe - ATI RAEDEON drivers that I used for the MODTOOL conversion
    4. dgt2.exe - a tool called "driver guide" that I attempted to use, to detect driver updates for the ATI MOBILITY RAEDEON in hopes that I could find an update that did what I wanted. I didn't find such an update, so I believe this tool was useless.
    5. pstrip.exe - I BELIEVE (but can't remember now) that this tool was for tweaking your monitor settings. May have been important, but I'm really not sure. I played around with it, but nothing was solved directly through it.

    And here's a dump of all the version information I could pull off my computer, for people who are having trouble getting this to work: 

    CATALYST Version 06.5
2D version 6.14.10.6614
Packaging Version 8.252-060503a-032464C

BIOS Version 006.006.006.008
BIOS Date 2002/10/02

Control Panel Version 6.14.10.5029

  5. Your support

    6. Please email me as to your success doing this. Also, if you find that this solution works for OTHER laptops with the same problem, let me know--I can add them here. I just want this to serve as a keyword bank; there's no need for EVERY person to use 6 hours to find the solution.

  6. Supported Setups

  7. Unsupported Setups & Other Known Solutions