Remember how I blogged about rolling with the punches?

So today my buddy and Prairie Dev Con speaker James Chambers went to present on Microsoft MVC. He brought his fancy new Dell XPS laptop, which he had used to do presentations and stream internet video to a projector before. But today, the technology gods were not smiling…

James tries to connect his laptop to the projector. Nothing. The projector just can’t recognize the connection. Realize that we’ve already had two sessions in that room already, so everything *should* work.

The Dell XPS laptop James has doesn’t have a VGA port. Instead, it has HDMI and Mini-Display ports. James had one of the Apple mini-display to VGA adapters. If I connected my Mac Book Pro, I could connect no problem, so it wasn’t the adapter. He could connect his laptop to projectors before, so it wasn’t the laptop. And we’d already had sessions, so it wasn’t the projector. So what was it?

Well, all three it turns out. Thanks to this post over at Irongeek.com we discovered that using Windows 7 on a Dell XPS with the Apple connector and a non-plug-in-play projector won’t work. So the fix was ditch the Apple connector, use the Star Tech model instead (listed in the Irongeek article).

So James is good to go, he’s going to talk at the last session and we’ve moved the Windows 8 talk Jim Russell and I were going to do until tomorrow.

Roll with the punches…