Xrandr and VGA - external display always labelled 'disconnected'

I have an laptop and a widescreen tv that I wish to use as an external monitor. With recent Xorg updates it's been easier and easier and all I have to do now is plug in the monitor and restart X - no special xorg.conf fixing needed. Except that the tv appears to be 16:9 whereas my laptop's widescreen is 1280x800 (which comes down to some other ratio). The result is that the image projected is light off center.
According to http://www.x.org/wiki/Projects/XRandR, I should be able to setup the external monitor specifically in my xorg.conf, the major plot point being that you need to connect the laptop to the tv to get it's advertised modes and resolutions and then run xrandr -q (for query). However, I always get "VGA-0 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)" regardless of whether the TV is connected or disconnected, off or on. All the while the screen is being doubled onto the TV... Does anybody have any experience with this? I'm using the radeon driver on a measly Xpress Radeon 200M if it's any relevance.

I haven't tried any of this for some time and I don't really have the time right now. First up is that at some point my computers screen was no longer doubled onto the TV at boot and only Windows could reestablish the link. However I was kinda hoping that the X upgrades might somehow have fixed this. Not so it appears?

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Bus:          PCIe
Slot:          Slot-1
PCIe Lane Width:          x16
VRAM (Total):          512 MB
Vendor:          ATI (0x1002)
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Revision ID:          0x0000
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[IMG]http://i256.photobucket.com/albums/hh187/PharaohSam/Speakersetup_zps94899a5c.jpg[/IMG]
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Xrandr and VGA - external display always labelled 'disconnected'

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