How to display VGA output in fullscreen on the TV?

Hi all,

Hopefully this is the right place to ask for suggestions.

I have a 720p 32-inch LCD TV. I have connected my laptop to the TV via VGA channel, but for some reason the laptop screen is centered on the TV with wide vertical black stripes. I want to get rid of those so that the laptop screen covers the entire TV area.

I have several different screen resolution options on Windows, but only 1024x768 works. The operating system will let me increase my resolution, but the TV will output a "mode not supported" message. I have tried everything I can think of but came up empty handed.

Note that the laptop has VGA, HDMI, and DisplayPort outputs. I tried using a HDMI-to-HDMI cable. I was able to use a higher resolution with no black stripes, but then colors were all washed out. I tried changing color settings on the TV with no ultimate satisfaction.

Would a DP-to-HDMI cable fix the problem? Is there a way to use the VGA cable and still achieve full screen display? I want to use all of the TV real estate instead of a partial area.

P.S. I noticed that the TV name is not recognized on the computer if the VGA cable is used. Rather there is a generic "display 2" name for it. If the HDMI cable is used, the OS will recognize the name. I also have the latest graphics driver.

Try to output over HDMI using 1366x768 resolution. The reason it looks washed out is because 720p is technically 1280x720, but most 720p TV's are actually 1366x768.

To use the entire screen, you need to adjust the scaling properties of whatever video card or onboard video you are using. What is your video chipset?

Also, you should play with the TV picture settings. For example, on my Samsung I have to have it set to "Just Scan" rather than "16:9" to fill the whole screen.