Dual Monitors

Tuesday, June 13th, 2006 at 9:19 AM | Category: Meryl's Notes Blog 2 comments

When I switched teams to a tech writer position, my company provided me with a second monitor. At first, I didn’t like it. The cursor was driving me nuts and I was constantly moving windows.

Now I can’t stand working on a computer or laptop with one monitor and wouldn’t mind a three panel monitor. Currently, I have two flat monitors side-by-side.

It makes working so much easier. As I grade student participation in the forums, I’ve got the class spreadsheet open on one monitor and the forums on the other. No going back and forth. I can also have a student’s assignment open along with the grade sheet and the answer sheet. Here’s where three monitors would be nice.

As I write a story, I can have email open so I can review the notes from the interviewees and have the article open on the other screen to write the story. I often have email open on one and a browser open on the other.

Don’t know how you measure productivity, but I know I’m more productive with the two as I’m not wasting time ALT-TABbing back and forth while trying to remember info.

Even Bill Gates uses three monitors.

Articles on dual monitors:

* NYTimes: Virtues of a Second Screen

* PC World

* About.com shows one landscape and one portrait monitor.

* Microsoft instructions for turning on dual monitors

* Multi-monitor resources including laptop solutions

* and many more…

Products:

* MAX Displays

* Ergotron stand

* Doublesight

* Digital Tigers

* Ergo in Demand Stands

* 9X Media

* DONZ

* Radius 320

* Panoram Technologies

* MASS

* Matrox Dual and Triple Head2Go – ooh!

* CineMassive

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2 comments

  • Posted by H.A. Page on June 13th, 2006, 10:42 AM

    When I started working on my masters in media studies, I started working on two monitors. I’m away from home for a lot of the summer now and it is driving me bats trying to work off of one right now.

    Two is definately the way to go!!!
    Cheers.

  • Posted by anders on June 22nd, 2006, 9:06 AM

    yep. when they gave me a second monitor at work, i cursed them because after a couple days i had to go out and buy a second monitor for my home system. now, i can’t stand working on a single monitor.

    i’ve also found that the Xinerama support that is available for linux/X11 which lets the windowing system and applications be aware of the dual-monitor setup is vastly superior to the “stretched” mode that most systems use. in particular, the Ion window manager with Xinerama is the greatest thing to happen to dual-monitor setups ever and pretty much has to be used to understand the sublime awesomeness.

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