You have to consider how the computer reconfigures itself every time you add or remove a display device.

Except half of the time your OS does weird-ass things in step 3, displays the wrong part of the screen, wrong resolution, crashes the app, etc. It's better now than it used to be, but then again a lot of presenters don't use bleeding-edge hardware with most recent & fully updated OS.

Alternative if you present regularly:

1. Enable "extended destkop", rather than "mirror desktop".

2. Select an appropriate wallpaper, or just black.

Best i can tell, presenters use mirror so that they can see their own slides on the screen while talking.

Frankly i think a seldom talked about Android feature may be a better solution.

https://developer.android.com/about/versions/android-4.2.htm...

I think PowerPoint already does this; Keynote's had it for ages, and I've done it on Linux with Beamer a few years back. You have presenter's notes with a small slide preview on the screen in front of you, actual slides on the big screen.

These days I run my presentations in reveal.js (HTML5), so the output is trivially cross-platform and videos, 3D content etc. always work flawlessly. This also has speaker notes, implemented as two browser windows (one for each screen) with linked controls.

Any presentation tool worth using has a presenter mode where on your primary display you see things like the current slide, your notes, a timer, the upcoming slide, etc.