Laptop not detecting secondary display

[PIZZA Man]

Okay, I'm trying to help a friend connect his Dell Inspiron 6000 to a HDTV he recently purchased. He had had it hooked up through the s-video, but was limited to 1024x768, so we used a VGA to HDMI adapter cable to connect it. Now however, it is not being detected by the driver. The graphics chip is a ATI Mobility Radeon X300. I'm using the extra tabs added by the ATI driver under Advanced Settings in the Display tab in Properties. I tried installing the legacy drivers (he's running XP), but the installer said there was not a compatible display device found (not exact words). It said the x300 hundred was supported on the download page, is it the fact that its a mobility card that it's not working? I have CCC on Windows 7 at home and it offers an option to force the computer to output through a head even when a display is not detected on it. Can I do something similar here? I'm open to pretty much anything, just shoot. Thanks in advanced!

Some extra info

Dell Inspiron 6000 running XP Pro SP3

Driver Provider: ATI Technologies Inc.
Driver Date: 8/3/2005
Driver Version 8.162.0.0

Also, when you drag windows they leave a white trail for a few seconds, if that helps at all.

 

[PIZZA Man]

Well I finally determined what the problem was on my own after a little research. Turns out the problem has nothing to do with the graphics drivers or anything like that, it was the VGA to HDMI cable that was the problem. VGA is analog, whilst HDMI is digital, so just using an adapter isn't going to work. The solution to this would be to either buy a VGA to HDMI converter box, or an external graphics card with either HDMI, or DVI-I or DVI-D with an HDMI adapter.