Hey Techies: How do I hook PC to TV ?

SpaaaceCowboy

Well-Known Member
Happy Turkey Day Everyone ! Tis' the season for turkey and football....

So how do I hook my laptop to my TV ? Laptop is Dell Inspiron, and TV is modern Samsung LCD. There are all kinds of different inputs on tv and outputs on laptop.
 

RyanTheRhino

Well-Known Member
HDMI cable... if its a laptop i would suggest getting a wireless mouse and key board so you can use your pc on the tv while sitting on your couch
 

trichome fiend

Well-Known Member
Solution: While is is possible to display the contents of your computer screen on the TV, you may not be very happy with the overall picture quality and the text is not very readable.
If that is no concern, here's how to connect your computer to a Television set (we used an HP Tablet Vista computer and a Sony Bravia HDTV for this example)


1. First you need a video cable for making the physically connection.
Most computers have an S-Video port that can be connected to the S-Video input of your TV screen using a very cheap S-Video cable (it's round with 4 or 7 pins).
For better picture quality, you should connect the computer to the TV using standard VGA ports or via the DVI to HDMI cable provided your TV supports these ports.




2. Open the "display settings" in your Vista computer and activate output to the TV screen. You can either mirror content of your computer on the TV or extend the display just like a dual monitor screen.
3. Pick up your TV remote and switch to "External Inputs" from the menu. You will need to change the default "Video 1" to a different selection which may be "HDMI 1" or "Video 2" depending on how you have made the connection.
Important: Make sure you connect the cable to the TV before turning on the computer as sometimes it may fail to recognize external display.
You may also need to change the screen resolution of your TV using the Display settings in your Control Panel else the picture may appear distorted.
 

blimey

Active Member
If it's a newer inspiron it might have an hdmi port, that does audio and video. Otherwise it has a monitor port that does video and then you can get a cable to go from your headphone jack to split into audio left and right ports for your tv.
 

Winter Woman

Well-Known Member
I just went through this and this is what I did. I took a picture of the back of the tv where the connection port is and I took a picture of the side of my laptop (I have hmdi) and I went to the micro center and they set me up with the cable I needed. Cost about $30 for a good cable. They didn't tell me I'd need a converter.

Then I went and bought a pc to tv television and that made it very simple.

Edit: My old set needed a converter analog to digital or some nonsense. It is a hdtv so why? Anyway, it's not that hard, if I can do it, you can do it.
 
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