How to Hookup a Laptop to an External Monitor

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Chris Bryce with superservice.com, and I'm going to talk to you about, how to hook up a laptop to an external computer monitor. For the best way to go about doing this, most laptops will have an external video port on them, for connecting exclusively to an external monitor. If your laptop doesn't have that port, then you're going to go out and have to get a replacement card, or upgrade card, that will usually be USB, that you can hook up to a USB port, that will then convert it to where you can output to that external monitor. But again, 90 percent of the laptops out there, are going to go ahead and have that VGA port on the back of them anyway, sometimes on the side. What you'll do is, you'll take the monitor, hook it to the side or the back of the laptop, in that monitor port, and go ahead and adjust the screws to make sure that the fitting is tight. Once that fitting is tight, turn on the monitor, the external monitor, and turn on the laptop. Once the laptop is on, you'll normally have a function key that will allow you to switch between the two monitors, or display on both monitors. On this particular laptop, the function key is F5. So we'll hit the F5 key, and that will toggle between either displaying on the laptop screen, on the external monitor, or displaying on both at the same time. That's the best way to hook up an external monitor to a laptop."