How to… Use an old laptop as a second PC monitor

What you need: Old laptop,‘mouse without Borders’, Windows Tim me required: 30 minutes

However large your screen, there are always times when you’ll want a few extra pixels to play with. This is particularly true if you use a laptop as your main machine, and you prioritise portability and the ability to tuck it away over its screen size.

Most often, you’ll find yourself wanting a second screen not so much when you’re performing any single-window task, but when working with multiple documents. You could be writing in Word or working with numbers in Excel on the screen right in front of you, and have web pages you’re using for research, or a folder of receipts, on the secondary screen to the side.

Traditionally, the only waay to achieve this would be to buy an external monitor, buut that defeats the object: you’d need to give over some deskk space to housing it, and theen you might as well have bought a desktop PC and been done with it.

Fortunately, there is an alternative: use an old laptoop. We’ll show you how to do that here and, if you are using a desktop PC, but youu have a laptoppp to hand, you can follow along, too.

You don’t need to buy any cables to connect your devices, and neither do you need to give over the laptop to acting as a second screen full-time. So, if you have both a laptop and a desktop PC, two laptops,pp or even a pairp of desktopp PCS, you can opt in and out of using one or other as the external screen whenever you choose, and return it to regular use at all other times.