Making Your Laptop Work Harder For You – How To Connect It To The TV

A personal computer is transformed into the portable computer or the laptop that everyone now carries around wherever they go and which seems to satisfy their computing, data storage, connectivity as well as entertainment needs.

With ever bigger hard drive memories, it has become an easy matter to store movies on your hard drive, to be viewed at leisure.

However, a smaller laptop screen, limited viewing angles, low quality sound and low resolution picture quality may not make it the best way to actually watch a film.

So how can you connect your laptop to your TV in a way that you can watch what you want in better comfort? CNET recently did an article, which suggested some simple ways to connect a laptop to a HDTV (High Definition TV).

• Intel’s Wireless Display Technology is a wire free way to send audio and video to the TV. As of now, however, formats such as DVD and Blu-ray are not supported. While you can watch internet videos on TV, you cannot hope to use this method to play games on TV because of the time lag.

• Many of the more recent Windows laptops are likely to have an HDMI port. This can make things really simple if you have the port: once the HDMI cable is plugged in, connection is usually automatic. Display settings of the laptop and picture settings of the TV may require adjustment and it is important to turn off mirroring of the TV and laptop displays to take advantage of the big screen viewing experience.

• Even those who don’t have an HDMI port on their laptop can check to see if they have a HDTV with VGA. A VGA to VGA connection will carry the video signal, and for audio you will need to use the audio out jack of your laptop. You can plug an external speaker and connect that for sound.

• For Mac users, the more recent MacBooks come equipped with the Mini display port jack which is basically equal to the HDMI port in windows laptops. You do however need a converter dongle such as a Griffin Video Display converter. Even in the older MacBooks, you can make it work with some effort to use the headphone jack for the audio.

For more information, you can also watch the CNET video that tells you how laptops these days are made to be used in conjunction with your TV.