Acer Aspire 1600 problem connecting external monitor

Greetings Major Geeks!

I bring you ill tidings I'm afraid.

Recently aquired my lil' sis's Acer Aspire 1600 series (1604LC) laptop. A 2.8GHz mean machine with a VGA port on the back. Silly me formatted and installed XP Pro anew, and downloaded the drivers for the machine from ACER.

Machine is formatted NTFS, WinXP Pro installed.
I then installed the following from ACER

ATI Technologies Inc. VGA driver 6.14.10.6374
SIS Accelerated Graphics port driver 7.2.0.117

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Three "Default Monitors" appear in Device Manager, and two in Display Properties/Settings. The TFT is indentified as 1, but I cannot change to an external one.

I've tried three screens: 17" CRT, 19" HP1955 and my new 22" HPw2207h.
Read the manual to the ACER, and it says that I switch between the internal/external monitor by pressing Fn+F7, which turns off the internal. The external in in sleep mode...

Any ideas, tips? I'm formatting the third time now, trying a different approach than last time, but it's getting late and already spent a good five hours :/

 

Re: Acer Aspire 1600 External Monitor Problem

I've scoured the net for any help and tips, but none found.