Make a Home Entertainment System Out Of Your Old Laptop

If you are like me, you don’t like throwing away old electronics, especially things that cost you a pretty penny in the past. You may not realize it, but your old laptop (or desktop) is ready to be changed into an extra TV set for little or no cost. Forget about having some special gizmo to left you search the internet with your television. There is no better way to search that internet than with a computer. I haven’t purchased a television in years actually, and I don’t plan to.

First off, your laptop is pretty much so ready as is to do this. Most relatively recent laptops have wireless cards in them, so you can either run an Ethernet cord from your router, or better, with the wireless run your mobile TV set anywhere in the house. You can use your laptop to play DVDs as it most likely has a built in DVD drive.

Where I watch the majority of my media on though is Netflix streaming. This pretty much enables my box into being a movie watching machine. Now, you can’t view a laptop screen from across the room, but here is where you can probably reuse something else you have no use for, an old monitor. Connect your monitor up to the VGA port and switch your laptop to duplicate the screen on both its display and the external monitor. I usually place the laptop behind the monitor, turned to the side, so I don’t see the same image twice.

For sound, you can buy a very cheap set of external speakers. I use Logitech’s Z5 Multimedia Speakers. What you probably most will want though is a wireless remote for sound. I chose the Logitech set specifically because it has a wireless remote. However, if your old laptop happens to be a MacBook (as mine is) it also comes with a remote control. Another option is that if you have a smart phone of some sort, they tend to have free apps that allow you to remote into your computer. If your phone is on WiFi then you can actually control the desktop of your laptop from the couch.

As an added bonus to all this, with ITunes installed or Windows Media Player, you can turn this setup into a remote music player. Again, smart phones tend to have apps for controlling remote media from a distance. Now, this doesn’t cover television itself, but, this is the internet generation, who needs that sort of old-fashioned media.

Enjoy!