No VGA? No Problem.

I recently upgraded my laptop from a several years old Dell Inspiron to a nice new shiny Dell XPS 15. It's a beautiful machine that kicks my old one in the mouth with its power, however when I went to hook it up to my VGA monitor I was shocked... NO VGA?! I should have realized they would be moving away from analog video in machines but still I was stunned. In order to avoid buying a new monitor to accommodate this inconvenience I began my search of how to work with my new machine and my old monitor.

The first thing I should have learned was that the XPS has a "Mini Displayport" on it in addition to HDMI out. Now the Mini Displayport is something Mac has been using for quite some time instead of VGA out. I today went to Best Buy and purchased a RocketFish Mini Displayport to VGA adapter (intended for Mac Books) but running perfect under windows 7. Now that is using the "Projector only" option in windows and a resolution of 1280x1084. If you have a vga monitor but no vga out on your laptop, check for a mini displayport, it worked for me perfectly right out of the box.

This was all of course after investing a ton of money into an HDMI to VGA converter which requires power to convert the signal from digital to analog and is over all a giant heap of junk. The resolution would not accommodate the monitor at all leaving me with 1 functioning resolution which made the screen look extremely skewed.

Mini Displayport to VGA adapter, simple solution to not having built in VGA output.