smart computer use?

Ok. I’ve been wanting to set up dual monitors on my main home PC for a long time. I never did until now, mainly because of the financial reasons.

Well, I had some tech money to spare in my business budget this year, and decided it was time to get two monitors.

The Benefits

Why do I want to monitors? The benefits of a dual monitor setup are quite profound. From PCWorld:

Stefan Thibeault, a programmer at a clothing manufacturer in Montreal, is convinced of the value of using dual PC monitors. Doing so has given him a much larger electronic workspace, eliminated such annoyances as the need to frequently alt-tab between applications and cut down on his trips to the printer.

Hmm, “Less alt-tabbing and less trips to printer”, you say?

Those are the exact top 2 reasons why I wanted dual monitors. It’s great. I used to have to print of simple text documents just so I could put them on a document clip next to my monitor for reference when typing. No longer. Dual monitors eliminated that.

I also used to have to to a lot of alt-tabbing between browsers, editors and other windows during complex web development projects (and even simple ones). All the tabbing and such was non-productive, I’d often tab away from a screen and then forget what I was even working on. Being able to keep more windows visible at all times helps keep me on task quite well, it’s much tougher to mentally wander.

The Initial Setup

I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on dual monitors, here’s what I ended up spending (I thought I got by pretty cheap):

• Two 24 inch Westinghouse LCD monitors for $220 each(on sale at Best Buy)
• A Geforce 9600 GT with dual monitor outputs for $120
• Two 10 foot VGA extension cables for $20
• Two DVI to VGA adapters for $20

So, basically all this hardware cost me about $700. Not bad considering that I would be upgrading from a single 19 inch LCD to two 24 inch LCD monitors, all for $700. Not bad at all.

The Catch

Well, once I got everything set up, I noticed that one of the Westinghouse LCD’s was broken. It had a stuck red pixel and the native resolution did not center at all on the monitor. Too bad, the other one worked perfectly.

After I found out that the one LCD monitor was bad (it took me a week to figure out it was the monitor and not my video card or drivers), I brought it back to Best Buy to get a replacement. They were out of that model though, nuts. I did get it for a great price, and that’s cause it was a discontinued model. So, now I wasn’t going to be able to have matching 24 inch LCD’s no matter what I did.

So I just returned the one broken one and got no replacement. I wish I coulda figured out that it was broken more quickly, I might have been able to get a replacement. Oh well.

Now I’m basically running a 24 inch and a 19 inch LCD side by side as dual monitors. That is still pretty slick and I really like it.