Using laptop with external drive?

poorbabe

This might well turn out to be a silly question, but I'm writing this inbetween jobs at work, so forgive me

My Viewsonic monitor appears to be dead. I checked the connections and changed the fuse but still nothing. My hard drive and router all power up fine and all the lights are on, it's just the monitor that's not working.

My question is, can I hook up my company laptop to my home hard drive so I can use the screen, until I either try a new power supply or buy a new monitor?

I'll check back here this evening as I need to get a document out the door before I leg it at 5pm.

Thanks in advance!

epz_2

by hard drive do you mean the box with your cdrom and monitor connections or the disk that stores your info.

if its the former then yeah, remote desktop software would be easy though im not sure how you could set it up without a screen.

if you just want to boot off the actual hard disk then its likely more problematic as if its running windows as and will likely not have the laptop drivers but still possible.

superscaper

epz wrote: »

if its the former then yeah, remote desktop software would be easy though im not sure how you could set it up without a screen.

Exactly, you'd still need a monitor in order to set it up on the pc in the first place. Certainly don't think there's a way of just using the laptop as simply a monitor.

And it's the entire PC (i.e. base unit or tower etc) I presume not just the hard drive (which is a component inside of the PC).

epz_2

well you could theoretically do it if you had a video in card, either in a pcimca form factor or external with usb2/pci & docking station but since the op didnt seem that clear on what a hard drive is i didnt want to bother them.

poorbabe

:T:T:T

Thanks for all your help people. I am embarrassed to have to say I should have written 'base unit' rather than 'hard drive' . You'd never have guessed I've been using computers for quite a number of years:o.

Also, when I said I'd checked all the connections, I hadn't checked the bit of the power lead that you connect to the monitor. I took the back off the computer, gave the lead a bit of a push into the monitor and lo and behold the monitor came to life :o

I must remember that power leads have TWO ends and not one :rolleyes::o