Resolve Linux screen freeze due to external monitor

My Laptop has  Linux mint 18 installed. Here is the thing I wanted to do. There is an extra monitor I wanted use it as a secondary screen (or dual display) and set the monitor's display as my primary screen.

However, the max resolution of the laptop(1366x768 16:9 ) and max resolution of the the monitor(1366x768 16:9 ) are different. So, whenever I connect the VGA cable of the monitor to my laptop(through an HDMI converter), it was just mirroring the screen with a low resolution 1024x768. And when is change the resolution to 1366x768 16:9 (or any other) the screen freezes. And you can not do anything. Either you can hard shutdown or reboot from here. Only the mouse pointer movement is seen but the clicks are not recognized . Keyboad's cap/num lights works but keys don't work. Only thing I can do is long press the power button till it is shutdown. Other option is to go to tty(Ctrl + Alt + F1 ) and login to reboot it. This seems like a bug. But whose OS/Kernal /Cinnamon - don't know the root cause.

These are my atttempts / understanding:

• Updating Linux mint - did NOT work.
• Updating Kernal - did NOT work.
• The secondary monitor is not hot pluggable in Linux mint(or in general Linux or due to HDMI - VGA convertion -- I don't understand it yet). 
• Finally the below steps did work.

Steps to solve the issue.

• Set the secondary monitor to primary in display option.
• Shutdown the machine.
• Make the VGA-HDMI connected to the machine.
• Start the machine.
• Go to the display option, changed the external monitor to max resolution [1366x768 16:9]. 
• Cool. All done and Enjoy the large screen ;-)