How to insure external display is set as main display

Aug 10, '06 09:30:00AM

Contributed by: Mr. H

This is very much a "niche" hint, but hopefully someone out there will find it useful. There are a few instances where you might want to use a laptop with its built-in LCD completely removed, using an external display instead. A couple I can think of are if you've broken the built-in screen somehow and don't want/can't afford to replace it, or have done what I did recently -- upgraded to a new laptop, but kept the old one to use as a server, and removed the old latop's LCD and sold it.

The problem is that even with the LCD removed, the motherboard still thinks that it is there. This means that you could run into a situation where the LCD is set as the main screen (with the menu-bar), and the external screen is set as a secondary display. Getting the menu-bar onto the external display using the GUI in this situation is pretty much impossible.

Here's what you need to do in order to guarantee that the external display will have the menu-bar:

A couple of notes:

If you are going to do this, make sure you do it before removing the LCD. I've tested this on an original Titanium PowerBook G4 running 10.3.9. This should work on other configurations, but, as always, YMMV.

Comments (15)


Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20060808051946975