External Monitors and Intel 945/955/965 Chipsets

Reinstalling my laptop today and tomorrow, and it reminded me that I ought to have posted about this 8 months ago when it happened.  So, I’m doing it now.

The Intel 945, 955, and 965 mobile graphics chipset is extremely popular in mobile computing.  Odds are fairly good that if you have any sort of “business” level laptop, or anything that’s under $1,000, or any tablet PC, you’ve got one of these babies pushing your video.

I don’t particularly like them (in comparison to nVidia chipsets) for a number of reasons.  The Intel graphics display utility widget is badly designed (the nVidia one is much better).  The chipset uses systems memory to increase its power, instead of having enough RAM on its own (both ATI and nVidia are both better at this), and most damning you can’t run all the games you might like to run on an Intel chipset … but I couldn’t find a tablet PC that I liked, otherwise, so I’m stuck with one.

The “out of the box” driver for the 945 chipset (and above) does not support all of the native resolutions for external monitors.  If you have a laptop and you never hook up an external screen, this is no big deal.  If you have a docking station, though, this can drive you mad.

No 1440×900, no 1680×1250.  If you have a nice widescreen digital flatpanel as an external device, this can make you crazy.

Turns out the fix is pretty easy, you download this driver from Intel and you’re all set.