Some advice to those who do presentations using laptops and LCD projectors. First of all the obvious, make sure the LCD projector is on, thsi sounds silly, the kind of tech support you get from the 1-800 numbers, but you really do have to make sure that it is on, and not in some kind of "sleep" mode. Secondly, make sure the cable between the LCD projector and the laptop are firmly attached to both devices, if it feels loose, just screw it in place, a loose connection can be the source of some problems. Now with all the straight forward things done, we have to consider the modes on the laptops. There are three; 1) Laptop only 2) Projector only 3) Both projector and laptop You can usually access these three modes by pressing the "function" or sometimes "fcn" button on the laptops, and at the same time, pressing a button marked LCD or CRT (or both as is the case on my laptop). Do this once for each mode mentioned above. If you do this step more than 3 times and nothing has happened move onto another troubleshooting technique, because there are only 3 different modes. The only other thing that you can do if the computer does not recognize the LCD projector after following the above steps, reboot the machine. This with the windows operating system, has never failed in the past. If you have an apple laptop, perhaps you have not heard of the advances in Intel technologies? But in this case you need only put the laptop into sleep mode, which as I recall is accessed via the drop-down menu, by clicking, with the only mouse button available, on the apple symbol in the upper left (right?) corner. Remember to hold the mouse button down, Macs have not caught onto the catch and release techniques yet. Final advice, that I can think of right now, is in the case of trying to play movies during a presentation. It has been my experience that this act commonly fails for the windows operating system. I have not seen it fail for Macs. If the movie fails, and you will know bacause there will be a large box appearing on the screen where nothing occurs, and yet around that box is the usual desktop. In this case, in some machines, there is a problem running mode 3) from above. To fix this you have to run the lapptop in mode 2). IE use the fcn key and LCD key to switch modes as described above.