How to Hook Up Your TV or HDTV to Your PC Computer as a Huge Monitor Screen, Anyone Can Do It!

Did you know that you could use your HDTV or even your standard television as a computer monitor? Actually, using a TV as a monitor screen is an awesome option. Your trusty TV can come through for you when your current PC monitor is giving you any trouble, hey it's always good to have a backup! Using a TV for your PC monitor could be even better than a monitor in a few situations. Like if you want to watch movies off your computer on a big screen. Or even if you like to play your PC games on a huge HDTV screen. Getting your TV screen setup to your computer isn't as hard as it seems, you can even hook your laptop up to a big screen, and this can be done in a few easy steps.

These are the steps needed to use the TV as a computer monitor. You first have to know what connections you have on your television. Usually, older TV's has an input of coaxial cable or RCA composite, or even S-video which can be a bit difficult setting up to your computer. HDTV's usually have either HDMI, DVI, Component Video or VGA outputs and setting this up to your PC is a breeze. If you have an older TV you will have to look for an RCA or S-Video adapter that plugs into your video card. If you have an HDTV however you can usually just buy a cable that goes from the TV into your computer. If you have a computer with a VGA plugin (the little blue one that most monitors use) then you can get an HDMI to VGA adapter, a DMI to VGA adapter, or use a straight VGA cord to plug your TV into your computer. If you have a DVI connection on your computer (the white one with more pins than the VGA connector) you can get an HDMI to DVI connector, VGA to DVI connector, or use a straight DVI to DVI cable to set up your brand new TV Monitor.

These adapters can be found very cheap online if you look, avoid big retail stores and you could save up to 200%. I usually buy all my cables and adapters for under $10 just using google.com product search. You can find wireless adapters to set up your TV to your Computer, however these adapters can be expensive and the quality is less that that of standard cables so i highly suggest not using these. Once you have the TV hooked up to your computer, you will have to change the input on your TV to whichever input it's on, and then go to your display properties on your computer to enable the TV if it's not already enabled.

Do you have problems getting a signal? You might be let down with the signal after the connection is complete. As you may know, the computer's signal is measured by pixels, but a standard TV is measured different than that, so you might want to mess around with your resolution settings from the comuter to get the best quality picture out of it. Try 640x480 up to 1280x1024 for old TV's. If you have a 720p TV use 1280x720, and if you have a 1080p TV use 1920x1080. If you have an old TV and are still having problems setting it up to your computer you might just want to look into an HDTV adapter, or even a brand new HDTV altogether, theyre getting pretty cheap these days!