They say it can't be done, but I don't believe 'em

Hey, first post though I use this site a lot, but this one's got me stymied so if anyone's got any brilliant or even rash and mediocre suggestions I'd love to hear about them! I'm a beginner to intermediate computer literacy-wise, but bear with me.

Problem:
I want to connect my laptop to my television so that I can watch streaming and downloaded videos on the bigger screen. No trouble connecting with an S video cable and the AV cables that came with my computer, however NO COLOUR! I've looked online and it seems to be a common problem, one with a low success rate unfortunately!

Materials:
Acer Aspire 4520 (from Thailand)
Vista Home Premium
nvidia GeForce 7000M graphics card
7 pin S video out and VGA out docks
Some crappy random Chinese SD television that came with my apartment
4 pin S video cable with single (yellow) RCA prong on the other end

Details:
I've tried monkeying with the resolution/Hz/colour quality settings along with the TV's video input settings (though apparently PAL is the one to be used with this set, PAL M and PAL N are my options) and no combination makes any difference at all.
I went to Best Buy to see about other possible cables and was told that the television isn't capable of displaying colour video from a computer.
This is further complicated with the fact that I live in Shanghai and speak and read about as much Chinese as the average jelly bean, the television has almost no English anywhere on it.
The only success story I've read on this problem is one guy who took apart and rewired his S video cable, eventually managing to tease colour out of his set. I could potentially try this, but I'd be on very shaky ground indeed!

My feeling is that this television is obviously designed to accept colour video feed from other devices, so there MUST be a way to get the signal formatted correctly. Some sort of cable? Some sort of adapter? An intermediary device? A program? Anybody got any ideas at all??

My pic of the TV won't upload, but from left to right there are two plugs for the AV cables which run from the headphone jack on my computer, and the third connects to the S video out on my laptop via the 4 pin/RCA video cable.

Thanks for thinking on this!
Danielle


PS cost IS an issue