It's annoying isn't it? You can watch DVDs and play PC games on your laptop and the picture quality is great, but there is no quick and easy way to connect your games console to your laptop and play with it using your laptop's screen. See also PS4 release date, specs and rumour round-up.

Unfortunately, there is no free way to get around this either (unless your laptop has a built in video capture card). So the first thing you're going to have to do is spend some money on a video capture card. This is the only thing you have to buy though and you can usually pick one of these up from anywhere beteeen £6-£80. After you've bought that card, follow our four step guide and you will be able to double your laptop up as a console monitor too.

If your games console is built for the UK make sure you buy a video capture card that is PAL-60 compatible, otherwise you will run into all sorts of problems.

Step 1.

Connect and install your video capture card to your laptop. Install the driver that comes with the video capture card. This will be available on the manufacturer's website or will be on a cd that comes with the capture card.

Step 2.

Connect the AV wires from your games console to your video capture card. These will be the three yellow (video), white (audio left) and red (audio right) wires.

Step 3.

Open the program that is used by your capture card - if your capture card doesn't come with a multimedia program don't worry, there are plenty of free programs that you can download that will work with a video capture card.

Step 4.

Turn on your games console and if you have connected everything correctly and your multimedia program is receiving the input signal from your console you should see the video output on your laptop monitor.