I recently picked upthe z558 off my brother-in-law. The machine was recently reformatted with XP SP3. It has a GeForce 8400 GS (upgrade from the stock card).

I'm having two issues and I believe they're related:

My monitor is connected via VGA and is working fine. I'm having problems cloning to my TV via s video. I tried opening properties from the desktop and choosing settings to do the cloning, but it gives no option to do so. It's acting like it doesn't recognize the other video source. Then I decided to try the NVidia control panel, which leads me to my second issue.

When I try to open the Nvidia control panel, nothing happens. It appears the program is trying to run, but never does. I've made sure I have the most current driver for this card (which it did), and when I tried to roll back to an older driver, it failed because there aren't any old versions to roll back to.

I realize this is likely a software issue related to the card and not the z500, but after browing many topics on this site, I see there are a lot of intelligent individuals here that might just be able to help.

Edit: Corrected model from z500 to z558.

Have you tried completely uninstalling the video card drivers, rebooting, then reinstalling?

No, I haven't. Like I said I've just received this omputer and haven't gone through all the documents to ensure I have all the driver software. I guess if I don't have the installation cd I could always snag it off the internet.

I'll give this a try tomorrow and see if this solves the problem. Thanks

If it's an nvidia card like you say, then you can snag the latest version off their website. I thought you said you checked for the latest versions. If not, then your problem is probably an older driver version that does not support that option you're looking for.

Sorry, it was late and I was unclear. I DO have the most up-to-date driver software. That last post was basically a thinking-out-loud post.

I mess up like that all the time :o.