Connecting laptop to projector

[neonplanet40]

Hi everyone I'm currently teaching in a school which has projectors but the computers with them are extremely slow to the point of causing problems.

I have a Dell xps laptop which has a HDMI output and display port too I think however the projectors connections are only VGA and composite.

How do I got about linking these up to run power points?

Thanks

Mark

[shaithis]

http://www.porta-charge.co.uk/hdmi-t...able-1-8m.html or similar.

HDMI on the laptop should be vga compatible.

[neonplanet40]

Ok thanks. I was just reading that you needed some expensive converter so was making sure!

[Pob255]

Yep that sort of adaptor should work fine.

I'd warn you about widescreen though, most projectors (esp older ones, and doubly true for most interactive white boards) are 4:3 1024x768 so they just letter box the image thus making it far smaller.
if you're just cloning the screen to the projector then you'll want to reset the laptop resolution to 1024x768 and have to put up with a stretched screen or black bars down each side of the laptop screen.

Next we have a rather annoying bit of legislation, all laptops and memory sticks (basically anything that would be taken off site) in a school that have the possibility of holding sensitive pupil data (any personal details, inc names, address, age, academic records, disciplinary or special requirements information or photo's) MUST be encrypted and to a minimum level too.

It's a right pain, we have to encrypt ever new teacher laptop and have to work our way through all the existing leptops, each one can take up too 10 hours to encrypt.
And you can bet they complain about the additional 10 digit password which must contain uppercase, lowercase, numbers and a special character.

(We're using Truecrypt for this, 7 pass, it's a bloody silly level of data encryption, I blame MI5's ability to leave laptops on trains for this)

Oh and pupils are under no such restrictions of course, they can use any old memory stck and keep whatever they want on it.