If you’re watching a film and the director wants to show that the, admittedly not too cool, almost certainly fat, pizza eating, greasy haired bloke is a geek – they tend to make sure the guy is using at least 2 screens (preferably about 10 but there’s been a recession …). This has caused a stigma of sorts about using multiple monitors, labelling doing so as an extremely nerdy and not particularly useful thing to do. In my opinion those people couldn’t be more wrong. Nothing can come close to the productivity increase a relatively heavy computer user can experience when adding a second screen, anybody that does more than just browse the web stands to benefit.
Monitors aren’t as expensive as they used to be either, when I first started Uni I bought an Acer screen from Amazon ( similiar to this one ) as a second monitor for my laptop. It’s not fantastic, but the extra size compared to my laptop screen is really nice. It’s now reached that stage where I struggle to use a computer without the extra screen real estate, especially when I’m coding (I love to have the code up on one screen and the current build or reference site on the other so I know what I’m doing). A lot of households even have a spare monitor from an old computer kicking around the house, even if the oldest CRT in the world it could still be fantastic to try out a secondary monitor and see whether it works for you.
Set-up with all modern OS’s is easy, most of the time it’s simply a case of plugging it in and selecting the option to extend your screen in the appropriate direction and you’re laughing. I’m a to-my-right kind of guy, which takes a bit of getting used to if its from a laptop where you can’t move the keyboard, but you get used to it in minutes.
I imagine that many of the people who read this are probably already using multiple monitors due to the nature of this site, how have you got your screens set-up? Let me know about any cool layouts or monster rigs in the comments below.