Here I have my laptop screen and I want to extend it onto this larger external monitor.
But how do I do that?
Hi everyone, Kevin here.
Today I want to show you how you can set up dual monitors on a Windows PC.
This way you have more screen real estate. So now, you can watch my videos on two screens.
Why limit yourself to just one. At the very end,
I'll also show you how you can use a laptop screen as your second monitor.
Let's check this out.
First, we need to look at the available ports on your computer.
The physical ports that you'll find on the side
or on the back of your computer and you'll likely see lots of different ports.
We're looking specifically for the display ports.
Here's a view of some of the most common display ports.
Feel free to pause the video right now to see if you can find a matching port on your computer.
Once you find it, that is your display port.
Here as an example, I have a laptop and this one happens to have a Thunderbolt display port.
OK, we're making some good progress.
Next, we're going to do the exact same exercise, but this time on our monitor, so here once again
you can see all of the most common display ports and see if you can find a match on your monitor.
Here as an example, I have a monitor and it has an HDMI, a display port,
and a Thunderbolt port, so I can use any one of these.
But because I have the Thunderbolt on my laptop, I'm going to use the Thunderbolt on my monitor.
Now that we've identified what port you have on your computer and what
port you have on your monitor, now we have to connect them with a cable.
If you already have a cable at home that connects both of those ports, you're pretty much done,
but if not, it's really easy to pick up a cable. Here I am on Amazon.com. You can use any other
retailer as well and within the search field I'm going to type in the first port name. So,
in my case, I'll type in Thunderbolt, then type in to and then type in the monitor port name.
So once again I'll type in Thunderbolt, and then I'll finish off by typing in cable.
Now when I search for it, I see all of the different available options
and here I see a Thunderbolt to Thunderbolt cable.
That's exactly what I need to connect my laptop to my external monitor.
When you search for cables online, they'll have just about any combination of cables.
In fact, you could even search for VGA to display port.
They have that as well.
If you have a very high end PC, you'll likely find
that you have multiple display ports on your computer.
Here in this example, there's an HDMI and three display ports,
so theoretically you could hook up up to four monitors to this computer.
And you can watch a lot of Kevin videos that way. Now that your monitor is connected to your
computer, let's see how we can configure it. On your Windows desktop, right click and then select
display settings. Right up at the top, you should see all of your connected monitors.
If you don't know which one is which, over here you can click on the identify button,
and this will tell you which monitor is which.
Over on the right-hand side,
in this drop-down list, you can choose how you want your monitors to behave.
Here I can choose duplicate, and this way I'll see the same exact image on both of my displays.
I can also choose to extend my displays, so this gives me even more space to work with.
Once I extend my displays, over here I can position them where I want them.
I can position it on the left, on the right, on the top, or on the bottom,
and this affects how you move your mouse from one screen to the other.
So you likely want to match how you have your screens positioned physically.
Back within this dropdown I could also choose just to show the image on
one of my screens, so either on one or on two.
This is helpful if say you have a laptop connected to a monitor,
but you only want to see the image on the monitor. Lastly, as a quick tip, instead of going through
this settings view, you can also just press the Windows key together with the P key,
P as in project, and that'll give you quick access to all of these options.
Down below you'll see a wide variety of settings that you can modify,
and you might have noticed that these settings are based on which monitor is currently selected.
So here if I select my other monitor, I can then modify the settings for that other monitor.
Next we're going to touch on some of the more interesting settings.
And one of the first ones here is you can make this your main display.
This affects things like where your taskbar shows up and where notifications appear.
As a quick aside, there are a number of different taskbar settings
when you have multiple monitors. Over on the left-hand side, click on personalization and
then click on taskbar behaviors, and here you can set it so your taskbar shows up on all monitors.
You also have a few other settings as well.
Back within display settings you can also adjust the scale.
So let's say that you want all of your fonts and images to appear larger, you can set that.
You can also adjust your monitors orientation, if say you want the image to be vertical.
That covers all of the core features, but next I want to show you a bonus trick that allows you
to use a laptop as your second screen, so maybe you have an old laptop sitting around at home.
You can now use that as your second monitor.
Within settings, on the left-hand side, click on system, then click on projecting to this PC.
If you don't see any drop downs on this page like what you see here, first you'll need to enable it.
Click on optional features and then let's click on add optional feature.
Here let's search for wireless display.
Then click on install.
Once you finish installing, go back to settings and
projecting to this PC and then launch the Connect app.
On your other PC, go to display settings and then click on connect to a wireless display.
You can now connect to your other laptop to project an image onto that screen.
Next, it'll ask you if you want to give the laptop that you're projecting to
access to the mouse and keyboard.
You could either check or uncheck this box.
And look at that! My laptop screen now serves as a second screen.
Here I could expand the window, I can move it around, I can also adjust it so it's full screen,
so now it truly is just another monitor for my primary computer.
Just like we looked at before, you can go into display settings
and it treats this just like another monitor, so you could adjust the position,
you can adjust the scale, the resolution, everything that we looked at before.
Once you're all done sharing your screen,
you can press the Windows + P key, P as in project and here you can now disconnect.
All right, well, hopefully you were able to successfully set up dual monitors.
Let me know down below in the comments, how many monitors are you connecting to your PC? To
watch more videos like this one, please consider subscribing, and I'll see you in the next video.