How to Use Your TV as a Computer Monitor - Updated 2020

is using your TV as a computer monitor really as easy as plugging an HDMI cable from your computer into the back of your TV let's find out hey what's going on everyone in today's video I'm gonna show you how easy it is to use your TV as a computer monitor but first you can pause the video right now and you can look to the side of the screen here I'm gonna list different times during this video that you can skip to so you can go to the most important parts of this video to help you along the way so if you need troubleshooting you can find the time stamp for that over here if you wanted to skip to just adapters there's a time stamp for that as well but let's jump right in and show you how easy it is to use your TV as a computer monitor so the very first thing I want to talk to you guys about is the inputs that you will find on your TV you are most definitely going to see an HDMI input and a VGA input so let's show you what those look like so you know so on the back of your TV you should actually see a couple inputs now they may be on the very back they may be on the side panel of your television but what you're gonna see is an HDMI and typically you're gonna see more than one HDMI input so here you can see we have one and two now we also have the VGA input now this is the little blue input right here that is another form of input that you could utilize with your computer so now that we've covered the inputs that are on your TV let's talk about what you can find on one of your PC's whether that's a laptop or a desktop computer on our first example we're using a desktop computer and you can see we have a VGA input and we also have an HDMI input we also have other inputs that we're going to talk about in future videos as well now the same could be said with a laptop on a laptop you will also find an HDMI input on the side on older models of laptops you could find a VGA input on the side as well so now that we have our inputs covered let's go ahead and plug in our TV to our computer in our examples for this video we're gonna be using an HDMI cable so what we're gonna do is go ahead and get that ready and we're gonna plug it into the side of our TV we're gonna use HDMI input 2 so we have the proper input selected on our TV we know that we plugged our HDMI cable into HDMI 2 and that's what selected on the t if you plug your cable into HDMI one for instance you might want to select that on your TV or if you're using VGA you might have an option for your input listed as VGA or PC input or other so now we have our cable ready we have our TV ready and we have our computer all we need to do next is go ahead and plug in our cable to our device and what should happen next is almost magic as you guys can see as soon as we plug in our cable from our computer to our TV should show up instantly right on our TV screen showing our desktop and now you can utilize your TV as your main monitor or you can actually utilize both your computer monitor or your laptop's monitor and the TV simultaneously or you can clone them and we're gonna talk about that in the troubleshooting portion of this video so you can skip right ahead to that if that's what you're interested in but next we're gonna talk about the different types of adapters that we could find both from our pcs or our TVs so as you guys can see now on our screen we have this list of different types of adapters that you would typically find both on your computers or on your TV quickly going over them we have mini VGA vga hdmi displayport DVID mini HDMI mini DisplayPort Thunderbolt dvi-i micro HDMI USB type-c Thunderbolt mini DVI and micro DVI now what's important to note about these is you can see what they look like on our screen now so if you have an input on your TV or on one of your computers that matches these you will need to find an adapter that will work for you now I want to show you guys some quick examples so you can see the different types of adapters that do exist this is a DVI to HDMI input so you can buy a cable that just converts your DVI input to HDMI so you can go right from your computer as you guys can see here plugs right into your computer and then it'll go right into your TV this one right here is a mini DVI you might typically see these on Mac books some of the older ones but this is mini DVI to HDMI one of my favorites that I use all the time on my book and you'll find these on other windows-based laptop computers is USB c2 HDMI so again just a quick easy adapter that goes from your USB see right to HDMI so you can utilize that the same way you would just utilizing a regular HDMI cable or VGA cable as well before we go into changing some settings I do want to mention the VGA cable which you can see what we have right here this is a standard VGA cable that you'd find that you could use on most computer monitors for instance but these are really cheap really easy to get you may have this input on your TV and your computer and it's the same process all you have to do is go ahead plug it into your computer that has a VGA input and then plug this into your TV and it should be that same process it should recognize instantly and you should be ready to go if you check the links in the description to this video below you're gonna find a few links to different types of adapters that you can find and use so you can complete your set up and use your TV as a computer monitor so now that we're done talking about it after let's jump over and configure things on our computer whether we're gonna clone our screen or extend our screens and also talk about different troubleshooting techniques that you might need to know about so that you can make sure everything is working properly so one of the things that you're gonna notice as soon as you plug in your TV to your computer is that the displays are cloned so that means whatever you have on your main desktop computer or your laptop screen will be cloned to your TV as you can see if I move the window around from my laptop you could see on the TV it's doing the same thing whatever we have on this display will show on your TV but let's talk about using your TV as a second display so that you can increase your productivity by utilizing two monitors so what we need to do is go ahead and find an open space on your desktop and right-click and click on display settings from display settings you guys are going to see it says one two and if we look down below it says duplicate these displays that means that it's cloning your main display to your second display so if we go down to this drop down here and click on it now is guys can see when we click on the drop-down menu we have a couple different options as we see we have these duplicate these displays which is selected currently we have extend these displays which would make it two monitors we can have show only on one and show only on to show only on one means that it'll only show your display on screen number one and show only on two means that it'll display only on your second screen so if we were to do that let's show you for an example we'll do show only on two and we're going to click on apply this would only display on our TV because that's what we just selected so if we wanted to have it that way we could utilize it this way if we'd like but for the sake of this video and showing you how you can increase productivity as well I'm gonna go back down and we're gonna go to the drop down menu again and we're going to click on extend these displays and click on apply I'm gonna keep these changes now what I want you guys to take note of is that these are essentially two separate monitors now so as you guys can see I could take this window right here that we're moving around and I can actually drag it across and it'll come up on my second screen now as you guys saw I actually had to drag the window from this screen this way in order to show up on this screen now that doesn't make very much sense does it what we need to actually do is go back into our display settings here and drag number one all the way over to the left side of number two then we just need to click on apply now what's gonna happen is I can take this window right here and move it across to the right and that is the proper way to make sure that our extended screens are working properly and it's the right setup for us this will let you put up windows on one screen and have more windows on another screen however you want to do this to increase your productivity is absolutely fine now I want to talk about a common troubleshooting issue that you might run across with your TV where the text size looks a little bit off we're gonna show you how you can adjust this from your computer but another way to do this is actually with your TV remote now this is for a samsung TV please keep in mind that obviously every TV brand is different every remote is going to be different but on this one it says P size there you guys can see that which stands for picture size now on your TV remote you might find a button that says zoom or crop or ratio something along those lines by clicking on that button it'll actually adjust the ratio size of your TV or the zoom size so it might be zoomed in a little bit too far if you have that option selected on your TV remote so if you cycle through those buttons on your remote it should adjust that screen size so many times you're gonna find that it crops out some of the outer layer of your desktop so you might not have all of your Start menu and task manager for instance but by finding a button that's similar to this on your TV remote you can adjust that size and have things back to normal the way that they should be let's talk about adjusting this on the computer now we know we talked about adaptors which are a great thing that you could utilize to make this really easy for you on desktop computers you guys can upgrade your video cards this is an older video card but this actually does have HDMI built into the video card itself and these just pop right into the desktop machine itself now laptops are a different story your best bet is going to be using one of the adapters that we talked about in this video if there's an adapter that we missed or a scenario that we didn't cover please throw that in the comments below so that we can make sure that we cover that and maybe in future videos or respond to you in the comments to get your issues resolved if adjusting the zoom or the crop with your TV remote doesn't work then another option is going to your desktop once again right-clicking and in any open area clicking on display settings once display settings opens up you can see it with our two monitors here what we're gonna do is scroll down and we want to make sure that we have the correct monitor or TV selected so in our case it's number two right here and you can distinguish this by pressing the identify button here and we'll show you which monitor that you are looking at in which monitor you're working at again clicking on that shows here's number two so we're less that monitor we're gonna work on this is our TV so we're gonna do is scroll down and the first thing that we're gonna look at here is change the size of text apps and other items we can have this at 100% which is the default setting or if you increase this it'll make everything a little bit bigger for us so that we are able to see the screen or the text and items on the screen a little bit better but we're gonna set this back to default the other thing that we want to check is our display resolution here we're have it set at 1920 by 1080 and this is recommended and this is what you should be using when you are using your TV as a computer monitor is the recommended settings that are under display resolution now you can adjust this to different sizes and it will make a big difference and how the screen is displayed as you can see everything got a little bit bigger but we want to use the recommended settings because these will be the most crisp clear and easy to see settings out of this menu here so that's all you have to do to adjust the ratio and size of what you are seeing on your screen hopefully that helps now one of the biggest questions that I get from people if they're utilizing anything other than an HDMI cable is how do I get sound it's very important that I know that the HDMI input will carry sound so if you're using HDMI from your laptop or your desktop to your TV you should get sound along with that if you are not getting sound it might be a cable issue it might be an issue with the hardware on your device but 99% of the time as soon as you plug an HDMI cable from your laptop or desktop to your TV any sound that you play from your computer or laptop should it carry right to the TV if you're utilizing any other cable like a VGA cable this does not carry sound so you would have to utilize the speaker's from either your laptop or your desktop or other types of external speakers but those speakers would have to be plugged into either your laptop or your desktop for the sound to work properly but if you want that sound to carry from your computer to your TV you will need to use an HDMI cable now another trouble the issue that I want to touch on is sound settings as we just talked about you need an HDMI cable running from your computer to your TV so that that actually carries the sound to the TV but what we can do here to make sure that our settings are working properly or if we need to adjust our settings because we want to use their internal speakers or external speakers what we're gonna do is go down to our task bar here and we're looking for the sound icon which is right here we're gonna right click on that and we're gonna do open sound settings once this is open we're gonna go to choose your output device I have mine set up for speakers I could also set mine up for this e 20 Nvidia which would be the HDMI going to my TV this is going to read something completely different for you based on the type of TV that you are using you may see something that says Sony or Philips or Samsung please take note of the type of TV you are using so that you can select the correct option if you're looking to use your TV to carry the sound if you have external speakers hooked up to your computer then you're obviously going to want to select the speakers option again this could be named differently depending on the type of speakers that you're using and the type of sound card that your computer is using as well so just make note of that you may have to fiddle around between these options to see which one works best for you but once you select it the default sound will then go to the output device that you had selected so that's it for this video I hope you guys found this really easy to use and found the navigation that we utilized in this video useful for you and I hope that you have fun using your TV as a computer monitor I've been doing it for years this TV right here is actually a monitor that I use personally all the time thank you guys for watching if you have any comments questions concerns throw them in the comments below I love hearing from you guys that's all we got for today's video as always take it easy

Channel: IT Career Questions

Views: 1,382,460

Keywords: IT Career Questions, cyber security, it careers, technology, information technology, it professional, how to use your tv as a computer monitor, use your tv as a computer monitor, tv as a monitor, using your tv as a monitor

Id: 2n4hYLfxTIU

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Tue May 26 2020