How to Use Your TV as a Second Monitor for Your Computer

Video Transcript

"Hi I'm Charles Stewart, Jr. and I'm going to show you how to use your TV as a second monitor for your computer. What is cool about these new LCD's and plasma's are that they have basically computer monitor connections on them. If you look on the back of most of them they'll have a VGA connection which you should be familiar with if you plugged in your computer because you will see it. There is a VGA connection on most graphics cards on your computer so that is the first thing you want to check is to make sure that your computer has two ports on the back of it and make sure because some lower end computers mainly have one port and that is because the graphics card is integrated into the mother board. But again most computers will have both options on there and one will be DBI and one will be VGA so if you have got that VGA which is usually blue then you're good to go. Also while most of the LCD's and most plasmas do have them not all do so if you have got a newer one you most definitely probably have one. So you'll want to look on the back of your LCD and try to find it and ours is right here so you are going to take your monitor cable and you are going to pretty much just plug it into the back of this and you also want to make sure when you do that that your TV is set on the input so you are going to cycle through the inputs like HGMI component until you get to the one that says VGA or computer. Now that I have plugged them in you will probably notice that this thing hasn't come up yet. Well that is because I haven't told th computer that there is two displays yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go into my settings and I'm going to go down and in this case I am using a Nvidia graphics card so I'm going to my Nvidia settings. So if you don't see something like this and you have a Nvidia card you can go to the Nvidia website and download it. It is pretty much universal for any card that is a Nvidia card. The same with ATI. So I'm going to go through and I am going to looking at inview display settings and I'm going to go for the horizontal span and as you can see it is giving me, you can do clone or you can have your monitor basically mimicked. So if you have got a monitor cable that is long enough you could have the computer maybe off next to your TV and then maybe have it hooked up to your TV so if you are watching a movie on your computer you can choose to clone it and see whatever is on your computer screen on your TV screen at the same time which is really good if you are using your computer to watch movies on. But for this we want dual display so we want to widen our canvas. So we're want to come over here and select our setting and it will flicker a little bit and then it will ask you do you want to keep these settings? And you are going to hit yes. So now you should see both computers and now your TV is acting as a computer monitor and you should see a nice wide canvas that you can scroll the mouse back and forth on that enables you to now have your TV hooked up to your computer."