Just wanting to Know what plug (wire) do i need to get to run my laptop monitor to my home TV so my TV is the monitor instead of the laptop

s own screen.

Michael Bub, Merrylands, NSW

Well, before you going looking for a plug, you need to go looking for a socket on your notebook. It's either called a "TV out" or an S-video output. It probably looks a bit like a PS2 mouse socket but with four pins only.

If your notebook's got one, you'll then need to find an S-video-to-S-video cable if your TV also supports S-video or an S-video-to-composite-video converter if it only supports composite video input.

The composite video socket looks the same as a typical audio input socket on a HiFi system called an RCA socket. You'll usually find it as a yellow socket on a TV. (You might even find a composite video output on older notebooks and desktop graphics cards. Just remember that S-Video gives a better picture than composite._

Both of these cables you can get from stores such as Dick Smith or Jaycar for around $10-$15.

If your notebook doesn't have one of those, you'll need to have a TV (or Plasma or LCD monitor) with component-video in. Here, you'll need a VGA-to-component-video cable to convert the VGA output socket to component-video input of your telly.

There are some direct VGA-to-composite/S-video converters but they are cheap because PAL TV and the VGA video standard are poles apart. Of course, if you're using a CRT telly or even a plasma, this would only be worth the effort for DVD movies and games, not for text work - CRT tellies don't have the resolution for PC work (they were never meant to!).

An even higher quality solution is to use a DVI lead, This assumes that you have DVI on both the notebook and TV (monitor). See these other HelpStation questions for more details on the subjects. Oh, and these too.

Hope this helps anyway.

Darren Yates