Dilly dally with Dell

I wanted to hook a new Dell notebook to a DVI desktop monitor. Keyboards, mice and networks all went together as planned. But no output to the screen. I spent an hour on a Website help line. 90 minutes on the phone. I waited days for the cable that was to fix things. Still no picture " wrong cable.

Another hour on the phone. A few more days waiting for a cable. Another failure. Yet another 45 minutes on the phone. Finally, I reached someone who realize that my monitor has a VGA plug so I don't need one of many variations of a VGA to DVI cable I'd been sent. If I had actually looked at the back of the LCD, I probably would have noticed this myself.