I am seriously thinking of giving up on the TV Licence, so many repeats etc and the £145.50p per year and on a tight budget.

I watch an old Mitsubishi CT-21M3 BM and have a spare tv, a Sanyo CE27LC5-B.

Will either of these televisions link up to my laptop so I can watch catch-up on a decent sized screen and if so what cable do I need and where can I get it from?

Many thanks in advance.

First off it would be helpful to know what sort of connections are on the TVs and the laptop.

I would hazard a guess that neither TV has anything resembling HDMI, which is becoming common on modern laptops. If there are only SCART or Composite video and audio sockets on the TV then things start to get messy.

If the laptop has a VGA connector you can get VGA to SCART leads which never work very well in my experience.

The big problem is if there are no matching connections on the laptop and TV it can get messy trying to interface the two. Very often there is no simple "bit of wire" solution and you have to use electronics to convert one signal format into another.

But knowing what connections you've got to play with will help.

Thank you for your reply.

Just letting you know I have a Hewlett Packard Notebook PC dv6760ea.

USB 2.0
10/100/1000 Ethernet
Consumer infrared lens
Power inputs 65-W to 90-W maximum
Composite TV
S-Video TV
Component TV
Headphone/speaker audio-out
Microphone audio-in
VGA

Does not have IEEE 1394 (4 pin port) or DVI.

Will have to have a look at the back of the tv's later.

Note that from the autumn you will need a licence to watch catch up on BBC iPlayer but will still be able to use catch up from the other channels. You can't watch live TV over the internet on any channel without a licence - this includes foreign channels.

The information I have found from HP's website does not mention Composite TV or Component TV. It does say it has a S-Video connector and HDMI.

If the TVs can accept S-Video then that would sort the problem. There may be a dedicated S-Video input or it may be via a SCART socket. You will need a S-Video lead plus a 3.5mm stereo jack to two phono plug lead (for the audio) and optionally a SCART adapter plug with S-Video and phono audio sockets.