First: Welcome aboard!
Sync at the MUTR monitor is a little bit tricky. The distance between the disc and the sensor must be correct. The manual says at the end of the axes, that was not working for me. Too near to the sensor is not working, too. So it was a bit tricky to find the good position. I had the monitor with me in Stuttgart to a computer fair for three days with plenty of time for long time tests.
a) The monitor needs some time to warm up. Sync works much better after the first 15 minutes.
b) check the connection to the laptop. The audio output is not perfect, with my Dell Latitude I'll get a negative picture, with my Amiga (as in Stuttgart) it works fine, but the Amiga has a "proper" line-out output with two cinch-sockets, not a simple headphone connector. It works perfect with a good CD-player, I use a Philips CD-i 210. Do not take the cheapest cable, but of course you need no high-end cable for 10 EUR.
c) The CD which came with the MUTR monitor is crap. Very bad quality and much too short films. They stop when sync starts to work. If you want some good examples, take the Video2NBTV software mentioned several times here in that forum. You can convert almost anything, best results of course with old black and white movies with many portraits, for examples singers.
d) You should experiment with other diffusors and maybe with LEDs in other colours. Recommended are orange LEDs, which look more like the original neon lamp, I use an ultrabright white LED with best results, even in long term tests (now about 100 hours).