It’s your big presentation, you’ve barely slept, you’re stressed and when you plug your laptop into the projector nothing happens.
Plugging a computer into a projector should be an easy enough exercise but you can end up with one of the following three situations:
- The projector shows a black screen
- Your screen goes black
- Both the screen and the projector go black.
This can be easily fixed.
On your Windows keyboard you have two keys, the FN (or FUNCTION) key and the external screen (CRT/LCD) key. Pressing these two keys at the same time allows you to cycle through the screen/projector combinations until you find the setting that works for you.
The problem is finding the external screen key.
On every computer it’s different. To make it even more confusing, there are different symbols to indicate the key. Here are 4 of the most common symbols used:
If you have an Apple laptop then it’s much easier, for all laptops made since 2008: Hold down the Command Key and press F1 to cycle through the combinations.