Connect your laptop to an external display

Laptop are increasingly usurping desktops in the home, with their portability and convenience making them ideal replacements for a lumbering tower and monitor. However, all modern laptops can still be connected to external displays, such as monitors and televisions, making for more comfortable viewing at higher resolutions when you wish.

Connecting to a display is fairly straightforward, but you will need to purchase a cable if you don’t already have one. HDMI (High Definition Media Interface) is the modern standard on televisions, with the advantage that it can carry sound as well as high definition video.

DVI is a larger connector, and you’ll find it on most flat panel monitors. High street stores will charge you over the odds for cables, so it’s worth looking online for the correct one.

1. Get wired

You’ll need specific cables to connect your laptop to an external monitor or television. HDMI is becoming more prevalent, and consists of a small plug rather like a USB. DVI is standard on large monitors, and this has a rectangular plug with 24 pins. VGA is found on older laptops, and these are generally coloured blue.

2. Connected

You’ll need to connect one end of the cable to the output on your laptop, and the other end to the relevant port on your television or monitor. Windows will automatically detect that an external display is connected, but you might need to switch to the relevant channel on your television to see the screen.

3. Configuration

Next, right-click on an empty area of your desktop and choose ‘Personalize’, followed by ‘Display’ and ‘Change display settings’. At the top of this screen, you’ll see all connected displays listed. Windows defaults to displaying the same information on both screens, but we’ll show you how you can change this later.

4. Resolution

When Windows is duplicating its information on both displays, it can only display at the maximum resolution of your smallest screen. This can sometimes look odd, but you can change the resolution with the drop-down slider under ‘Resolution’. Click ‘Apply’ to see how it looks, and change it back if it looks strange.

5. Orientation

This allows you to choose which way up Windows is displayed on your monitor or television. Some monitors can be turned 90 degrees, which makes it easier to read news stories or write long documents. You can also ‘flip’ the display so it’s upside-down, which may come in handy in a really odd situation.

6. Multiple displays

If you want to do different things with each screen, ‘Extend these displays’ enables this, moving the second display to the right of your primary one, so any open windows can be dragged across. ‘Show desktop only on 1’ switches off your secondary display, whereas ‘only on 2’ switches off your main display.

7. Checking your displays

If you run into problems, click ‘Detect’ to refresh all the displays currently connected. You can also click ‘Identify’ to see which display is which, with a huge number appearing on each. Click ‘Make this my main display’ on the relevant screen to have all the Windows essentials 

displayed there.

8. More tricks

You can now take your laptop and cable with you anywhere and connect it to a TV to watch films, and show off home movies and photos. You can also connect your laptop to a projector for ultra-large fun. One more trick to bear in mind: hit [Windows] and [P] to quickly switch between multiple display configurations.