TV-out on laptop

[green2]

Hello everyone... I want to get an older laptop probably a p2 or p3, mainly for playing mp3s and hooking up to my TV and probably once in a while using it for word processing etc...

I really need it to have TV-out capabilities though, but most of the older laptops do not have this feature. Is there any chance to include it as an add-on card? Can someone please let me know what and how and where? Thank you.

 

[Jeff7]

I've used a laptop already with a P3 650MHz chip in it that has TV-out....and actually, I have seen them with P2 300's that have TV-out. But yeah, ones that slow with TV-out are rare; I don't know that it's possible to add TV-out either. Maybe you could get a converter that would let you plug a TV into the 15-pin monitor output connector, but it might cost as much as a really old laptop, at least for a half-decent converter.

Ooh, just saw that you want to do word processing on a TV - bad idea. TV pixels are much larger than those of PC monitors, so they can't output decent text at all; you'd probably have a tough time reading it even if you sat a foot away from the TV.
About the only thing TV-out seems to be good for is video, slideshows, games that don't have a lot of text, and maybe Powerpoint stuff.

 

[Antoneo]

I agree with Jeff7, using your TV as a monitor is a bad idea unless you have a nice HDTV screen. On most TVs, text is very blurry and will likely give you a headache after ten minutes. Also your resolution choices are limited to (usually) 640x480 or 800x600.

However, playing DVDs via TV out is certainly viable and often done. If you find an older laptop without TV out, there are (though they probably stopped making them) MPEG PCMCIA decoder cards available. I'm not sure of the cost, it's been a while but you could very likely find an old laptop with TV out for a decent price.