Guides · Second lives for old computers

The laptop with the broken screen? Put it under the TV.

Somewhere in your house is a laptop that stopped being a laptop — cracked screen, dead hinge, or just retired. Its screen may be gone, but the computer inside is fine, and a TV is a screen. An afternoon of setup gets you a machine that plays your entire music and video collection, runs YouTube on the big telly, and cost you nothing. Here's the honest version — including the two things the enthusiastic guides never mention.

Last updated: 8 August 2026Cost: £0 (up to ~£20 if you want a remote)

First, the honest bit: who this is (and isn't) for

This build is brilliant for playing your own stuff — the music collection, the ripped DVDs, the family videos, the photo archive, podcasts, YouTube, internet radio. That's most of what most people want, and an old laptop does it beautifully.

Who shouldn't bother

If your household's evening is mostly Netflix and Disney+, stop here and spend ~£30 on a streamer stick instead. Not because the laptop can't run them — because the streaming services won't let it run them well. Netflix caps browsers on Linux at 720p (their own support page says so), Disney+ reportedly serves Linux browsers barely-DVD quality, and even on Windows, 4K needs newer hardware than these laptops have. It's a rights-management rule, not a performance problem, and no amount of tinkering fixes a policy. A Fire TV Stick handles the streaming apps properly; the laptop handles everything the stick can't — your own library. Plenty of living rooms happily run both.

What you need

Any Windows laptop from roughly 2013 onwards — Kodi's requirements are modest, and anything with an Intel chip from that era hardware-decodes 1080p video without breaking a sweat
An HDMI cable to the TV
A phone (your remote — free), or a ~£15–20 USB "air mouse" remote if you'd rather have a thing with buttons
Mains power where the TV lives

The thing nobody warns you about: your TV remote won't work

TVs and set-top boxes control each other over HDMI using a protocol called CEC. Here's the catch: computers don't speak it — essentially no PC graphics hardware supports CEC, so your TV remote cannot drive the laptop, full stop. Every "media PC" guide that shows a person pointing a TV remote at their setup is either using extra hardware or lying with stock photos.

The good news is the solutions are cheap and actually pleasant:

Your phone, free: Kodi's official remote app Kore (Android and iOS) turns the phone into a proper remote — browse the library from the sofa, tap to play. It's actively maintained and genuinely good.
A £15–20 air-mouse remote: a little handheld with a USB dongle — wave-to-point, with play/pause buttons and often a tiny keyboard on the back. Plug in the dongle and it just works; no drivers, no pairing ritual. This is the one purchase worth making if the machine will be used by people who don't want to touch a phone app.

The build, step by step

Check what still works. If the laptop boots Windows and you can see it on the TV (plug in HDMI, press Windows key + P, choose "Second screen only"), you're in business. One honest caveat for fully-dead screens: the startup/BIOS menus usually don't appear on the TV — most laptops only light up the HDMI port once the operating system loads. If Windows still boots, that doesn't matter. If you were planning a fresh operating system install on a completely dead screen, you may need a friend's hands (or a one-time screen repair) for the install step itself.
Pick your flavour. Three good options, in increasing order of commitment: (a) Keep Windows and just install Kodi — least effort, fine choice, especially with free ESU security updates running to October 2027. (b) Switch it to Linux and install Kodi — makes an old machine feel lighter and keeps a browser handy; run our two-minute hardware check first. (c) LibreELEC — a tiny system that is Kodi and nothing else: the laptop boots straight into your media library like an appliance. Wonderful for a set-and-forget machine; the trade is there's no browser and no desktop at all. It still ships versions for ordinary PCs and laptops, including a "Legacy" build for older graphics.
Install Kodi (currently version 21, free, from kodi.tv or your Linux software centre) and point it at your files. Add your video and music folders, let it fetch artwork and descriptions, and enjoy the moment your dusty file server turns into something that looks like a streaming service — except it's yours. If your files live on another machine or you want to browse the library from phones and tablets too, add Jellyfin (also free) as the library server — it and Kodi are happy housemates on the same laptop.
Teach it to run with the lid closed. On Windows: Control Panel → Power Options → "Choose what closing the lid does" → set "When I close the lid", Plugged in, to Do nothing (leave the on-battery one alone, so it still sleeps in a bag). On Linux Mint it's a dropdown in Power Management; Zorin needs a small settings tweak — though helpfully, with an external screen attached it usually keeps running anyway.
Set up the remote: install Kore on your phone (enable "Allow remote control" in Kodi's settings), or plug in the air mouse's USB dongle. Either way, from here on the laptop is furniture.
Look after the hardware. Closed-lid running traps a bit more heat: give it a hard, flat surface with the vents clear (a vertical laptop stand is ideal). And a laptop plugged in around the clock is hard on its battery — if the maker's software offers a charge limit (often ~80%), turn it on; if you ever see the case bulging, that's a swollen battery — stop using it and have it out. Video playback is light work; an old machine will do this job for years.

The electricity question, honestly

An old laptop idles somewhere around 15–60 watts; a streamer stick sips 2–5. So yes, the stick is 5–15× more efficient — and for a few hours of evening use, the laptop still costs pennies. If it'll run around the clock as a media server, it's worth knowing; if it gets switched on for films, it's a rounding error. We'd rather you had the real numbers than a slogan either way.

The two purchases that make sense here (both optional): a USB air-mouse remote (~£15–20) if phones-as-remotes aren't your household's style, and a streamer stick (~£30, often much less on sale) if Netflix and friends are part of the evening — the laptop and the stick genuinely do different jobs. If you buy through these links we may earn a small commission at no cost to you; once you're on the retailer's site, their cookies apply, not ours. We only link things that fit the advice above.

Where this goes next

Once there's a always-on machine under the TV, people tend to discover the rest of the iceberg: Jellyfin serving the whole house, the laptop doubling as a network backup target, internet radio in the kitchen. That's the fun of it — the "broken" laptop quietly becomes the most useful computer in the house. More guides in that direction are coming; the Guides page is where they'll appear.

If the facts move, we'll tell you

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