How to connect HP Spectre x360 eb0003na to Dell U2412M monitor

[Debs2020]

I'm trying to connect my Spectre to a Dell U2412M monitor and would appreciate some advice as I can't seem to get a good resolution on the monitor.

• The Spectre has Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps signaling rate) with SuperSpeed USB Type-C 10Gbps signaling rate, DisplayPort 1.4 and HDMI 2.0b ports, and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 Ti graphics card.
• The monitor has DVI (which is working perfectly with a PC), VGA (working perfectly with an Apple MacBook Pro using a USB-C to VGA connector) and DisplayPort (I've never used this).

I'm thinking of buying the HP Spectre USB-C Travel Dock which has a VGA DisplayPort 1.2 that supports display resolution up to 1920 x 1080 at 60Hz. But before investing I want to prove the Dell monitor will work with the Spectre via VGA.

So, I took the Apple USB-C to VGA connector from the MacBook Pro and plugged it in to the Spectre's Thunderbolt port. Then I tried different ways of configuring the Dell monitor under Multiple Displays, as shown below. None was successful.

I'm not sure whether the problem is the Apple connector (are they only suitable for Apple laptops?), the drivers on the Spectre (but I've tried updating them and Windows says everything is up to date), or maybe the Spectre is just too far advanced to work with the U2412M on VGA and I need to buy a different adapter to connect from HDMI to DVI or from the Thunderbolt port instead.

Any advice would be much appreciated.

These are the configurations I've tried:

1. Duplicate these displays (this is the setting I want to use)

The text is the correct size on the Dell monitor but it's badly pixilated and the top and bottom 4cm of the screen are not used (black).

Advanced Display Settings shows that it recognises the monitor as Dell U2412M and that it's connected to the GTX 1650 graphics card. Desktop Resolution shows 3840 x 2160 and Active Signal Resolution shows1024 x 768.

Display Adapter Properties - Adapter tab has a list of valid modes (640 x 480, 720 x 480, 720 x 576, 800 x 600 and 1024 x 768) but it doesn't let me select any of them.

2. Show only on 2

With this setting the text on the Dell monitor is far too large.

I've tried changing the display resolution from 1024 x 768 (recommended) to 1920 x 1200 (the maximum the monitor can handle) but this is ignored and it just goes back to 1024 x 768.

3. Extend these displays

With the Spectre as the main display the text on the Dell monitor is in proportion but it's too large. So for example if I open Excel I have to zoom down to between 50 and 75% to get enough data on screen, but then the quality is lost and it all looks pixilated.

Advanced Display Settings shows that it recognises the monitor as Dell U2412M and that it's connected to the GTX 1650 graphics card. Desktop Resolution shows 1024 x 768 and Active Signal Resolution shows1024 x 768.

If I switch it round so the Dell is the main display, everything on the U2412M is suddenly huge - icons, text, everything. Unusable.