TR Forums

I am wondering what are the more practical uses for two monitors. Does it watch movies/play games better, or more for coding and designing? Major advantages?

Basically more screen real estate (2x 1280x1024 > 1920x1200 for example). For work, you can put different things on different monitors, like if you want "full screen" side-by-side comparison of code/documents, or your Email/IM clients on one screen and other work stuff on the other, etc.

For gaming, if you are running games like FSX, it supports multiple monitors. Some games may allow you to see the game full screen on one monitor and your IM/Teamspeak on the other (I can be wrong on this one).

For work, it has many uses (having e-mail always open, being able to copy data from one document to another, etc). For programming it is great too. When working with VBA in Excel, I have Excel open on the left monitor, Visual Basic open on the center monitor, and a browser on the right for references and stuff.

Being able to have movie/TV on a second screen, or have e-mail/IM/Winamp always open makes life easy.

Two monitors really make a huge difference for me in terms of productivity. I first used two 1280x1024 19" LCDs when I was doing GIS work. I started in that position with one, then found some evidence that multiple monitors increase productivity which freed up some room in the budget to buy some for myself and my employees. Our productivity increased substantially.

Now as a developer, I have two 1600x1200 LCDs on my desk. Having SQLYog & FTP Voyager open on one with Eclipse on the other is so much better than switching between windows on one monitor.

A good friend of mine is a professional photographer who uses three Dell 2005fpw 1680x1050 LCDs that he uses for image editing. He has all of his Photoshop tool and action panels open on one, Bridge on another, and the main image for editing on the third. It's a pretty slick setup.

I briefly had a 1900x1200 on my desk, and (along with other reasons) sent it back in favor of the two 1600x1200s.