That's the chipset. It has an ATI mobile 4650. I wouldn't use that for gaming.GuitarFreak2

Thats an accetable video card to game on if you can deal with not going beyond medium settings on most modern games.

But I used two different headsets!

tarnishedsteel0

You failed to mention that in your first post. What OS are you using? Have the headphones worked fine before with your current OS install, or did you just start using them?

Its possible you'll have to manually adjust your audio output configuration in either the sound card drivers or in Windows Control Panel -> Sound / Multimedia devices configuration. You can specify speakers or headphones or whatever for your output device.

If the speakers plug into the same jack work just fine, it pretty much indicates the headset is the problem / needs replacing.

Only 2 years? You mean 2 years from now I can't play the latest games? If true, at least I'll have the classics.brandontwb

You'll be able to play the latest games for the next 4 years, just as long as you accept that you're going to be playing many of the later ones on medium to low settings.

Keep in mind you only have to use those dongles if you don't have 6-pin connectors with your power supply.

Theres nothing special to using an external drive - just plug it into your system and Windows should install it as a second hard drive on your system. The rest is just standard copying and pasting.

For games, you only really want to go for savegame files, backing up the whole game does little good. Games save file locations vary. Some store them in the same directory the game was installed in (Steam-based games / older titles). Most newer games create folders in your My Documents space for saves and config files. You're gonna have to spot-check each for the savegame files you wish to backup.

Does your video card have multiple outputs, and have you tried plugging in the monitor to all the outputs? Kinda sounds like Windows is confused about which port it should be outputting video to.

It can be done, but you can't go too high or the laptop's cooling mechanism won't be able to keep up.

Have you removed your previous Nvidia driver package, reboot, and installed the latest drivers?

In the meantime there is a program called VLC media player, it's free and it uses it's own set of codecs (and it has just about every codec too!) instead of the ones installed with Windows. Chances are you'll be able to play the file with VLC media player.Marfoo

And unless Realmedia has changed their game since I last installed their software (its been a few years), you won't have to deal with a whole bunch of Ads, links, shareware, services and other garbage that comes with Realplayer, either.

VLC is a good alternative. Others include Real Alternative and KMPlayer.