Voices from Technology

Want an easy way to increase your productivity on your computer by at least 30%? Add a secong monitor.

With two monitors, you can have a browser open on one screen and chat open on the second like I do. Have a Word document open on the first and do online research with the second. You can even play Solitaire on one and watch Hulu or YouTube on the second.

You can do this pretty easily with a pair of video cards, or one video card that has two signal outs. DVI and VGA are good for this. I originally used SiS AGP onboard graphics and an nVidia TNT2-M64 PCI video card with a matched pair of Mitsubishi 15" CRTs on Windows 98SE. I know use XP Home with a BFG nVidia 8500GT, and two LCDs. Both are from Dell, one is a 19" and the other is a 17".

Here's a picture of my old setup.

This setup is using one 21" CRT and two 19" CRTs on an FX5600 256mb AGP card and an FX5200 128MB PCI card with XP Pro. I'd still use it, but I wanted some desk space back. Which promptly got covered in stuff anyway.

There's tons of tutorials on where and how to setup your OS for this, and it sure looks cool.