Hi, I'm in Canada visiting family and am trying to help my sister out with her monitors.

She currently has 1 external monitor hooked up to her laptop via vga, and that works fine.

We went out and purchased another monitor to hook up via her hdmi ready port. The new monitor has dvi, so we got an hdmi cable and hdmi to dvi adapter. All good so far, except that the 2nd monitor will not work at all. When I hook it up, it says it is going into sleep mode and the power light goes into power save mode. Her laptop goes on an extreme slowdown, to the point that the cursor barely moves at times, and it's impossible to click on anything. The same thing happens when I connect just the new monitor and unplug the vga cable.

With the new monitor connected, the cpu runs at almost 100%, drops down to about 60, then back up again (the process hogging is the graphics). At the same time, the device manager flashes that there are 3 generic monitors connected, then goes blank, then says there are 3 connected and back and forth....When I unplug the hdmi monitor, it says there are 2 generic monitors connected and everything functions as normal.

I've googled and can't find anything to help me out.  I've updated the drivers for the new monitor and have updated the laptop as well.

I just realized that I haven't tried the new monitor on vga. I'm not at my sister's now but will be going back there this weekend and will try it then. But in the meantime is it possible to hook up 2 monitors in this way or is there something else I should be doing? Thanks.

laptop: hp g70-457ca
1st monitor: acer (forgot to get model #)
2nd monitor: hp 2009m
operating system: vista 64 bit