Is a second monitor useful?

[effpeetee]

As I always renew my computer by buying a complete outfit, I have also accumulated spare monitors. I am wondering whether to add one of them to my present outfit and what the advantages might be of having two monitors.. I have plenty of space on my computer station.

Any help will be appreciated.:D

Frank

[bazz]

well, in my view, if you want to have immediate information of views (of your web pages), at different resolutions then it can be useful. Although, I would personally rely more on browsershots.org.

then, if you want them hooked up like they are two parts of the one monitor, then your desktop can be bigger. That can be useful if you are a busy, but tidy, person. for me, it would just mean I have a sqillion icons instead of the bazillion I already have.

depends what you need really.

good to hear from you. I hadn't seen you around, lately.

bazz

[bazz]

you might find these links useful

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/using/setup/learnmore/northrup_multimon.mspx

http://www.maxivista.com/multi_monitor.htm

bazz

[gnomeontherun]

I personally LOVE dual monitors. Its like sitting at mission control or something. Besides the cool factor, its very helpful when I'm working on one monitor and referencing the other. That is the major thing, that and video editing is 5034 times easier with two monitors.

One problem is if they are different getting them to be the same color and brightness, something to consider! If you want to test on various resolutions, dual monitors is not useful to me. Just set up an older machine just for testing.

[brad211987]

It's almost essential for me. My productivity nearly doubles by having the extra display area. Even if its just to keep email up and on a different screen, it helps. If you do many things at once, I would absolutely recommend it.

There are some quirks as jeremywilken mentioned, using different monitors can be strange sometimes. If you have two monitors that do not have identical color and resolution settings, it becomes quite noticeable when they are side by side. Also, with different resolutions, you can get stuck fiddling with resizing windows to fit the different monitors (right now one of my monitors is running at 1920 x 1200, and the other is 1280 x 1024).

I use a tool to help manage multiple monitors and it cuts down on the issues with resolution, but color differences are still problematic sometimes.

[effpeetee]

Thank you all for your help. I will give it a go. Will I need some extra software or will windows 7 do the trick?

I have 3 desktops and a laptop so it should prove interesting!
Windows 7; Windows XP; Windows Vista Home Premium twice.

Frank

[brad211987]

You should be able to configure it in Windows 7, but I can't for the life of me remember where. In XP its just in the "settings" tab of the display properties, and I believe its in a similar location on Windows 7. There should be an option to select the 2nd monitor and "extend my desktop to this monitor".

[BoldUlysses]

Frank,

I would think it depends more on your video card than on Windows. The OS had the functionality built-in (at least) back in XP, and I can't imagine they've removed it. Does your video card have two outputs?

I use two monitors here at work and can't imagine going back to one. It makes me feel like I can breathe, visually. The elbow room is very nice.

[effpeetee]

Yes, my video card has two outputs.

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[ipmark]

Couldnt live without it these days, hate using a laptop!

The advantage of having dreamweaver/photoshop open full screen and the actual webpage on the other is excellent.
Or photoshop/graphics library.
Webpage/current project
the list goes on....

Great increase to productivity, saves a lot of time and effort.

Any windows from XP up supports this (maybe below but never tried), all depends on the graphics card. Any ATI or Nvidea with 2 ports will work fine.

[effpeetee]

ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT (Prerelease - WDDM 1.1) [Display adapter.

I'll have a go this afternoon. Wish me luck!

Frank

[ohgod]

only having one monitor makes the baby jesus cry.



really though... at work i might be ssh'd into 5-10 other machines... being able to have a few up at a time is absolutely priceless.


for personal use: as was mentioned before... video editing is so much nicer with 2. and pretty much any program with dockable windows that you can undock and spread out so you can interact with more information at once makes it far far nicer.

[shawnhenry]

I ahve a 24" monitor as well, but I USED to have dual monitors. I'm to cheap to buy another one at the moment.

About the games. Full screen will just be on your primary monitor, although I prefer to play games in windowed mode.. But for gaming, as I said, it wouldn't be stretched.

Your desktop - You will have your background you do now, and the same thing just copied over to the other monitor, they won't stretch - not by default anyway.. you could probably do it..

There are applications out there, free ones, that will allow you to have a taskbar on your second monitor also, so that's also an option. You can also just stick your taskbar on your secondary monitor, but it WILL NOT stretch across both monitors. This was something I was trying to do FOREVER....
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