Is it safe to use an external monitor at a screen resolution higher than specified by my laptop?

Question

I have an ASUS Eee PC 1005PX laptop computer. As the screen on it is rather small, I bought an IBM brand flat screen monitor and connected it to the VGA port of the laptop.

According to my laptop manual, my laptop's VGA port can display at 1028x768. After plugging the external monitor, however, Debian/Xorg chose a resolution of 1280x1024. As far as I can tell, it seems to run fine at that higher resolution, although I have noticed that when typing, the computer is sluggish.

• Will long-term use of this external monitor at higher resolution likely damage my laptop?
• Is the sluggish delay in typing likely a result of using an external monitor or related to the higher resolution?

Answer 1

That's fine, the max resolution your VGA port can support is: 1400x1050

The GMA 3150 supports one digital LVDS port (to connect the internal display) with resolutions up to 1366x768. Furthermore, an external analog VGA port with resolutions up to 1400x1050 is supported.

Answer 2

Using the external VGA monitor is perfectly safe. No damage will be caused to your netbook. It is there to be used... However, your netbook does not have a dedicated GPU, graphics chipset, or video memory, it uses the CPU and built in RAM for processing graphics. So the more you do graphics-wise, like higher resolutions, the slower it will run.

Lowering the resolution to 1024x768 will increase performance, weather it is enough to be acceptable is up to you.