Dual Monitor Problems on HP dv 2700 Laptop

[Shyweum]

I have an HP Pavillion DV2700 Notebook PC. It has an AMD Turion 64 x 2 processor, TL-64 with 2.20 GHz.

I’ve upgraded to 4.0 GB of ram. My embedded video processor is 7150M/nForce 630M. I recently installed a 512 GB Solid state drive to replace a 200 GB original drive running Windows Vista.

Nvidia-304 (recommended)
version 304.134-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
NVIDIA legacy binary driver-version 304.134

I believe I’m running the 64-bit version of Linux Mint in the cinnamon environment.

I am running the English version.

Am I getting output errors? Sometimes booting is unsuccessful. Suddenly I’m getting a Times New Roman looking “Linux Mint” splash screen instead of the nifty logo.

I haven’t been using any “codes” or command lines.

I’m pretty green.

I have two issues: 1) After my kids helped me complete the USB Flash drive burning and installation steps, my laptop screen seemed to perform perfectly. But after I installed the “recommended” driver for my NVIDIA GeForce video the splash screen became a typed “Linux Mint 18.1” and sometimes my laptop doesn’t boot properly. Should I go back to the open source driver or take some other action?

2) I have a pretty old Magnavox 17MD255V/17B tv/monitor that my son managed to get to work with this laptop when it was running windows Vista on my old hard drive. I have not been able to make the same monitor work as a secondary monitor sharing a desktop and connected to the laptop with a VGA cable in Linux. I keep getting the “no input” message on the second monitor. Once, I managed to get it to copy the information on my laptop monitor, but no matter what settings I used in the “display settings” screen, the monitor never did communicate with my mouse or show extra desktop area.

I saw there was a similar post that wanted the following “xrandr --verbose” information from the console, so here it is:

Screen 0: minimum 8 x 8, current 1280 x 800, maximum 4096 x 4096
VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
Identifier: 0x23b
Timestamp: 40577
Subpixel: unknown
Clones:
CRTCs: 0 1
Transform: 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
filter:
SignalFormat: VGA
supported: VGA
ConnectorType: VGA
ConnectorNumber: 0
_ConnectorLocation: 0
TV-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)
Identifier: 0x23c
Timestamp: 40577
Subpixel: unknown
Clones:
CRTCs: 0 1
Transform: 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
filter:
SignalFormat: unknown
supported: unknown
ConnectorType: TV
ConnectorNumber: 2
_ConnectorLocation: 2
LVDS-0 connected primary 1280x800+0+0 (0x23e) normal (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 304mm x 190mm
Identifier: 0x23d
Timestamp: 40577
Subpixel: unknown
Gamma: 1.0:1.0:1.0
Brightness: 1.0
Clones:
CRTC: 0
CRTCs: 0 1
Transform: 1.000000 0.000000 0.000000
0.000000 1.000000 0.000000
0.000000 0.000000 1.000000
filter:
EDID:
00ffffffffffff00320c011200000000
00110103801e13780ab3859558538a28
25505400000001010101010101010101
010101010101121b007d502016303020
360030be100000180000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000fe004c
475068696c6970734c43440a000000fe
004c503134315758332d544c423400d2
SignalFormat: LVDS
supported: LVDS
ConnectorType: Panel
ConnectorNumber: 5
_ConnectorLocation: 3
1280x800 (0x23e) 69.300MHz -HSync -VSync *current +preferred
h: width 1280 start 1328 end 1360 total 1405 skew 0 clock 49.32KHz
v: height 800 start 803 end 809 total 822 clock 60.00Hz

Sorry if it was stupid to not have everything running hot and connected when I got the verbose information above, but I don’t understand what the command does, so I’m not sure that it matters. Remember that I’m green like Kermit.

Thanks for your willingness to help.