I feel kind of lame asking this question, but I need an answer, so here it is:

I have an HP laptop with an S-Video out. I am running Windows XP. I have Vegas 7 (and am a brand new user). I want to preview my timeline on an external monitor. I've found the button which allows me to do this. When I plug in my external monitor via S-Video, as usual it mimics what is on my laptop. But, I could not get Vegas to preview anything on the monitor. So then I began messing around by 'Extending my Windows desktop on to this monitor'. Once I did that the preview would open and fill the screen...of my laptop. I could not figure out how to get it to fill the screen of the external monitor.

Any suggestions?

Preview via firewire through a convertor instead. Vegas *can* use a secondary monitor but using firewire will be better than trying to get the S-Video to work.

For whatever reason you can't get Edwards suggestion to work; which would be optimal considering what I'm about to suggest, you could set your desktop to stretch to your secondary monitor, in destop setup, then detach the video monitor from vegas and drag it to the screen that is stretched, probably the far right side of your desktop. I did this the otherday, it was not a pretty display.

But get firewire through a converter to work, it's a much better option.

Also try using a computer monitor, if you have one available. Plug it into the VGA port of your laptop.

Set up as "extend my desktop onto this display" in windows, not "clone".

Select "use windows secondary display" in the preview preferences in Vegas.

Furthermore, if you use Magic bullet or some plugin that requires the GPU of your video card, forget firewire, you will need to use the windows secondary display option. If you said you want the timeline on the external monitor, change your video card option to show your external as the PRIMARY monitor and that will do it. Hope this helps. J