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Is VGA port hot-pluggable?

Fresh5 days ago
Mar 15, 202626539 views
Confidence Score1%
1%

Problem

In meetings, I often see people detaching the VGA connector from one running laptop and connecting it to another, while the projector is still on. Is this 100% risk free, and OK by design of the VGA standard? If there's a risk involved in hot-plugging VGA, can it be removed by turning off or suspending either laptop, display, or both? I see this being done all the time without causing disaster, so clearly I'm not interested in answers stating "we do it all the time, so it should be OK!". I want to know if there's a risk - real or in theory - that something breaks when doing this. EDIT: I did an internet search on the topic, and I never found a clear statement as to why it is safe or unsafe to hot swap VGA devices. The typical form is a forum question asking basically the same question as I did, and the following types of statements Yes it's hot swappable! I do it all the time! It involves some kind of risk, so don't do it! You're some kind of moron if you think there's a risk, so just…

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Fix for: Is VGA port hot-pluggable?

Low Risk

Let's look at the signals in a VGA connector: Pins 1, 2, 3: (R, G, B) 0 to 0.7V analog color signals to the monitor Pins 13, 14: (Hsync, Vsync) 0 to 5V TTL synchronization signals to the monitor Pin 9: 5V power to the monitor's I2C EEPROM Pins 12, 15: (SDA,SCL) 0 to 5V I2C clock and data to/from the monitor's EEPROM Pins 11, 12, 4, 15: (ID0,ID1,ID2,ID3) ID pins, obsolete If we take a look at the schematic of a relatively modern LCD monitor, (LG L1733TR, taken from here), we can see several prot…

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