S-video will be the death of me

I have a hp compaq nx9110 laptop with an ati mobility radeon 9000/9100 igp graphics card with 128 mb ram. I have two televisions in the house a sony which is quite old and a hitachi which is also not that new. Both tv's have s-video inputs of the 4 pin variety. When I connect the Hitachi to the laptop everything works fine and I get a colour picture. When I first connected the laptop to the sony I had a few problems getting it to work but I messed around with some settings turned both the tv and the laptop on and off a few times and it worked in full colour.
I moved the Sony TV into another room recently and lo-behold I have no colour, the picture is in black and white and I can only get the desktop to extend to the secondary screen if I turn off the tv firsti then when I turn it back on the extra desktop space is there but it is in black and white and when I go to the display properties it tells me that the tv is not connected. This has been driving me nuts and I have no idea what has changed, I have changed some of the PAL settings etc while the laptop is connected to the hitachi but this has not changed the fact that the picture on the sony is black and white and plays no video when media player is moved to that particular screen.
Please help. I know that it has worked only a few days ago but I don't know what has changed. I'm going crazy here.

 

Have you tried updating the graphics card drivers?

 

I have all the latest video drivers installed. I have tried two different s-video cables with the same results. I mean it was all working last week, but now I only get a black and white image on my sony tv, and the laptop tells me that it is not connected.

 

If it is still working with the other tv i would say it is a problem with the tv.
Maybe you need to switch it to a different channel.

 

The tv only has the av and s-av channels to use. Sorry that I'm not making it any easier. but I just don't know what to do. is there any other way I could connect the laptoop to this bastard of a telly? And like I said before it was actually working not a week ago.

 

I had exactly the same problem it went on for months in the end i got a tv with a vga port.

Does the laptop still work on the other tv?

 

Has your tv got a scart socket?

 

yep I do have a scart socket I guess that comes in conjunction with av1, there is unfortunately only 1 scart socket and one s-video(on the front). The Hitachi on the other hand has a couple of scart sockets at the back (and a frontal s-video)and to use the laptop with it you need to select sav-3, whereas on the sony you select sav.

 

You can get an adaptor to turn an s-video into a scart.