It's been some time since I last looked into this, but if I remember correctly, even though Thunderbolt is compatible with DisplayPort, for whatever smart apple reason you can't connect your computer to the Mac monitor using a DisplayPort, it has to be Thunderbolt. And even if you had Thunderbolt on your laptop it's not guaranteed to work if it's not an macbook. Mac has really nice displays, it's such a shame that they made them so difficult to re-use.