Can I use an old laptop as monitor and keyboard for the free desktop tower I just scored?

Just came home from work with the receptionists old HP Win7 with every kind of connection input you could think of for a pre usb3.0 machine.
my cost $0.00

I have an old gateway laptop running xp & with only 6gb of HD space I use it w/ a usb drive for quarantining iTunes to keep all of it's synching to my iPad and updating away from my main laptop.

But , could I use that old laptop to be the keyboard input and monitor for the desktop? what would I need? do I have to get another keyboard and monitor just for initial set up? (im sure i have one or two in storage I should have thrown out years ago.)

Just new to having the time to experiment with things.

Thanks
Dagnabit

 

Hm. That's an interesting question. The quick answer is no. The underlying reason is that laptop hardware is (for the most part) not standardized like desktop PC hardware is.

The long answer is maybe.

You could pull out the LVDS cable and attach it to an LVDS board with the correct connector. But that isn't free.

Likewise for the keyboard, except you'd have to fabricate a converter cable yourself, and figuring out the keymap would be a science project.

The alternate, not really what you asked answer, is use VNC software like tightvnc, realvnc, etc. or windows remote desktop. But you would need to set that up with another monitor and keyboard at first, and would always be subject to network latency.

 

Thanks,
I guess I need VPN lessons. - I'll try one of those links in the meantime... don't care too much about lag just setting up as backup drive and possibly some shared resources - if I can figure out how.

.

 

I would agree with the legendary Allur's alternate solution, I have teamviewer client installed on both my computers for when I am too lazy to walk up the stairs (LOL)