How can I connect a PC laptp to my Apple Display 24" monitor?

Hi,

Unfortunately my MBP is useless when it comes to Excel and certain other software which i need for work. Therefore, I need to work from a PC at times.

Is there any way to connect my Windows7 laptop to my 24" Apple Display?

The Apple display is probably 3 years old and has a mini display port, power cable and USB.

My laptop has VGA and HDMI; I would prefer to use HDMI out.

I've searched everywhere and can't find any such cable.

Microsoft Excel is available for the Mac and functions just like it does on Windows. There are free alternates like LibreOffice or decent priced version of Numbers from Apple. Why is the MBP "useless" when it comes to Excel?

Hi Raz0rEdge - appreciate your comment. I run Mac Office 2011 but if you have an XLS over a few thousand rows if goes very, very slowly even with 16gb RAM and quad core i7 chip. Sometimes I'm sent 60mb files which the Mac simply can't process in a reasonable time. I can get around this with a Virtual Machine running Win 7 and PC Office 2010.

The other software I have an issue with is a specialist analytics programme which won't run in OSx (an issue with Java that started a few weeks ago - the updates won't fix it) and when running the programme it crashes my Virtual machine running Windows7. It does work on a dedicated Win7 machine though.

So, I need a way (ideally) to push the image from a laptop to my Apple Display or I need to buy a new display and junk the Apple one (which seems a waste).

jmk said:

Is there any way to connect my Windows7 laptop to my 24" Apple Display?

The Apple display is probably 3 years old and has a mini display port, power cable and USB.

My laptop has VGA and HDMI; I would prefer to use HDMI out.

I've searched everywhere and can't find any such cable.

Click to expand...

There are options out there, but they aren't cheap. Look into brands such as Kanex and Atlona. Not sure if they'll have what you need, but its worth a try.

Only thing I'm aware of to get from your laptop to "any" displayport only monitor is going to be via an active converter from HDMI to displayport.

There could be more, but I only know of one at this time - link.
It would require a HDMI cable to the converter, then a DP to mDP adapter to plug in that Cinema Display. Can't vouch for how well it will work.

The other option would probably be via an external USB video card with displayport output - have not seen one of those either.

edit: Atlona does have one - link - designed specifically for the 24 & 27" Cinema displays - link on that page to their newest model also.