Solved Second Laptop As Monitor

I have a Acer Aspire E1-572 as my current laptop right now and I feel like my screen is too small. I've considered getting a monitor, but I have a laptop lying around. It is a Acer Aspire E1-531 | Intel Celeron B820 with 4 gb's of ram. But the laptop doesnt really work. Well the hard drive is corrupted so it doesnt really have a use at the moment. I was wondering if theres a way to use the second laptop as a second monitor. I have tried just plugging into my HDMI cable with Live Boot Linux running on the second laptop but it doesnt seem to work.

Here is a link of a thread with my problem of my laptop for more details: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows8_1-system/acer-aspire-e1-531-not-starting-up-no-bootable/d5c56b41-6c9f-4ef2-9450-8f406d9de7d2

All Help Will Be Appreciated

The monitor jacks on the laptop are signal out only. You can't feed a signal in and have it display on the built in screen.

So would buying a monitor be my only option?

You can do it with software over a network but the software isn't free. I don't even remember what its called at the moment. Even so, both laptops would have to have a working OS for it to work. There is no easy way to make a second laptop a second monitor. Buying another monitor may be a lot easier.

Yeah i see what you're saying. I've tried Synergy but it just allows me to control both Laptop's with 1 mouse and keyboard. That isn't what I'm really looking for.

It's too much hassle to do it that way, you can most probably by a second hand monitor of that size cheaper.

Not to mention you'll be tearing apart a working laptop to do it.

alphanumeric said:

Not to mention you'll be tearing apart a working laptop to do it.

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Lol. that too. I did it once, long tome ago when LCD monitors were very expensive and spent 3 days on it, had to make a dual voltage PSU for it, nightmare !!!

CountMike said:

alphanumeric said:

Not to mention you'll be tearing apart a working laptop to do it.

Click to expand...

Lol. that too. I did it once, long tome ago when LCD monitors were very expensive and spent 3 days on it, had to make a dual voltage PSU for it, nightmare !!!

Click to expand...

I've toyed with the idea once when I had a couple of dead laptops with defective motherboards. After looking at what was involved and no guaranty it would work, I decided against it. Just too much hassle.

This brings back memories of the "Red Green" Canadian TV show. It was hilarious, that guy could cobble anything together and usually with duct tape.

Any tool can be the right tool. If the woman don't find you hansom, they should at least find you handy.

alphanumeric said:

Any tool can be the right tool. If the woman don't find you hansom, they should at least find you handy.

Click to expand...

Thanks guys. I found a really simple method that isn't really 100% perfect but works, at least for time being. This is for anyone that is wondering

What I did was make a ghost monitor from my default laptop
Set that monitor to extend the screen
Install Teamviewer on both laptops
Connect your 'second laptop' through teamviewer to your first one
Change the desktop of the second laptop that is emulating the teamviewer to the second desktop screen.
That should work now.
Everything I just said I got from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQBTn21214Q