A Dual Monitor Experiment

backBeat writes "This is a descriptive article about one man and his dual monitor odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article: "The productivity increase lasted for about two days. At this point I realized that I could to work on one monitor and watch a full screen DVD on the other. This was pretty cool until I realized how counterproductive it could be. Luckily I am quite adept at concentrating on my writing, while typing, while watching a movie." The Dual Monitor Experiment did not disappoint."

I love my dual monitor

[networkBoy]

I often work with both my LCD and notebook displays on using the notebook display as my primary and the LCD for reference guides/schematics/etc. Big boost to productivity and less mousing!

-nB

Productivity

[JaredOfEuropa]

At this point I realized that I could to work on one monitor and watch a full screen DVD on the other. This was pretty cool until I realized how counterproductive it could be.

Amateur! The obvious solution is to get a 3rd monitor for watching your DVDs. That is what I did... (on a separate computer, though)

Dual head is really helpful for productivity for certain jobs. The most obvious and common job is the kind where you have to work on one document, while referring to other documents or webpages. I found that being able to keep my own document open while reading stuff on the other screen, really helps me to keep my flow of thought. Even a small extra screen provides much more useful desktop real estate than a single, high resolution monitor: I have a 1200x1024 17" main screen and a smaller 1024x768 15" one... both LCDs. I found this to be such an improvement over a single 21" 2048xwhatever tube, that I now got dual head at work as well.

#1 upgrade to get if a paperwork person

[gsfprez]

i was a system engineer for a very large military contractor/airplane maker - and i insist on at least two monitors, even if that means buying the parts myself... which i had to.

in any case - when doing documentation review, action item lists, and various document comparison tasks - the bulk of systems engineering for a big contractor - having two monitors should be a requirement. otherwise, one needs to keep switching between two documents, and you can never actually look at both at the same time.. so missing things is quite easy.

most people in my office would print documents so that they could work on the other document that they were doing the comparison work to...

before i left - 4 people had badgered the IT geeks to give them dual monitor setups, and from what i hear, its up to 7 now - because for the MS Office drones, dual monitors is the greatest thing on the planet.

The worst part is that the IT geeks - who could also have benefited from dual monitors by setting up status screens 100% of the time on one monitor, and their daily tasks like email on the other - would bitch like John Stweart on Crossfire about how it was a waste and an over the top luxury...

but they never concidered how much time and paper it saved me... and if everyone had one, how the paper would go down tremendously.

oh well, most major corp IT drones are asshole MSCE singles with bad skin and worse interpersonal skillz anyhow.

Re:I love my dual monitor

[Klar]

I've been using two monitors for about for years now, and I don't thik I could ever go back! The swing arm [xyzcomputing.com] thing in the article seems cool, but I must say that I love my Ikea Desk [uoguelph.ca]! Was around $200 and the moitors can swing--I'm a student and my bed is beside my desk, so I can swing my monitor to face my bed to watch tv and movies!

The two monitors come in very handy when programing, writing reports, or surfing the web while IM'ing. Just did a networking assignment last night, and I could have several consoles open on the 2nd monitor to test clients/server while coding on the other monitor.

If you haven't tried 2 monitors, do it now! No excuses, 's cheap--if you don't have a vid card that can do 2 monitors, get a 2nd cheap pci card for like $20 and throw another monitor on.. do it!

my experiences...

[bolind]

He should have gone for dual CPU's instead, two comments above my threshold, and slashdotted to pulp.

Anyhoo, I've had dual monitors under linux (KDE) for about six months now. This was with a Matrox G400 dual and two 19" Samsung 900NF CRT's.

The good things:
-plenty of space. Hardly ever used virtual desktops anymore.
-great when coding, writing in LaTeX, or anything else that has one window editing some source, and another compiling it.

The bad things:
-everything broke. All the time. KDE seemed to acknowledge that a window that was miximized should not expand over two full screens, but after an upgrade, that went out the window.
-mplayer, a long time favourite of mine, did not play well. It refused to play on one monitor (but it always started there), fullscreen just turned one monitor blank.
-Having just upgraded XFree86, it broke something. Back to one monitor untill I get four hours to muck with XF86Config again.
-Takes up a boatload of desk space (I know, TFT's would help, but I don't have $1500 to blow on a set of them.) Same goes for heat and electricity, although I don't pay (directly) for that.

OK, one might get better results with two video cards (Why, oh why, did I give away 3 (three) Millenium II's with 4mb RAM?), ironically.

Bo

Re:I love my dual monitor

[Technician]

LCD for reference guides/schematics/etc. Big boost to productivity and less mousing!


I agree. A dual PC setup is much more useful than a dual monitor setup. This is most certanly true in the Windows world. I find it difficult to read the how-to to eradicate some piece of malware while going through the reboot into safe mode process.

Instead of printing all the instructions out, then trying to follow them, it's much easier to have the procedure open on a laptop nearby. The laptop can also be downloading the files to make the emergency boot disk you are going to need for the recovery.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[Anonymous Coward]

what kind of geeks are you?
I have 3 monitors on my desk. And I'm thinking of replacing one of the CRTs with an 20" LCD. BTW, production is only limited by your own motivation regardless of the number of monitors.

Re:Worse part about dual monitors.

[BrookHarty]

Is that you soon realize that going back to one monitor is impossible.

I have 2 21'inch monitors on my desk, Its annoying, I've went back to 1 monitor.

The main problem, you use the 2nd monitor to use as a real time display, you either put something like IRC, Email, VNC. Then you do all your main work in 1 window on your main display.

Since I'm only looking at 1 application while I'm working, its just easier for me to alt-tab.

I thought it would be easier to use 2 monitors with RDP/VNC on the 2nd monitor, I didnt care for it.

Even better on the Macintosh

[Gryffin]

...but, then, what isn't? ;{)

But seriously, folks... the Macintosh has been able to do this since the Macintosh II came out in 1987. Back then color monitors were relatively pricy and low-resolution; many graphic artists would hook up an older B&W tube for tool pallets and text windows, so they could use all those colors pixels for the main document window.

What's more, Apple's version of this feature supports as many monitors as you can connect, and supports spanning the desktop across monitors of different resolution and/or but depth, too. There's a panel that shows you all your monitors' display spaces, and lets you drag them around to indicate their physical arrangement. Microsoft shamelessly ripped off the feature and interface for Windows, but of course, they did so ten years laters, and their solution is limited to matching resolution/bit depth.

Mod parent up too!

[goldspider]

I've never seen such a blatant self-promoting assclown in my entire Slashdot life. Is there some sort of e-mail blacklist to filter out these kind of "article" submissions?

Re:Mod Parent Up! And...

[wcb4]

interesting concept.... slashdotting a gmail account.... wonder if even a 1GB gmail account could stand up to a paragraph or two from every slashdot reader........

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[kisielk]

All recently made (or not so recently) laptops with ATI or NVidia display adapters should be able to do it. Even my puny Toshiba w/ Radeon 7000 video that cost me $1200 CAD new can handle dual-head. At work I use a Thinkpad with a 9000 dual head as well.

Big deal

[rxmd]

I don't know how this is supposed to be a big thing for anyone. I've been working with a multi-monitor setup for years, first on a Mac SE/30 that is still chugging away at home, then under Windows since 98 (where it worked flawlessly) and under BSD using X. The Mac has been supporting this for ages, as long as you put in extra graphics cards. X is the most inconvenient environment because Xinerama doesn't deal that well with different screen resolutions at once.

A lot of my work involves TeX, where it is just convenient to have Emacs on one screen and the DVI output on another. I've done extensive image cataloguing and indexing, too, where you can have the image full-screen and your database next to it. This is just so convenient that I have trouble doing without it. When I bought a laptop, I always took care to pick one where the graphics chipset supported driving two monitors simultaneously.

Ad Revenue

[goldspider]

It would seem that this person has a history of using Slashdot as a vehicle to increase traffic to his website, presumably to generate ad revenue.

IMHO this is abuse of Slashdot's popularity, and thus his accounts (and any new ones created with his e-mail address) should be pulled.

Re:I love my dual monitor

[blixel]

I often work with both my LCD and notebook displays on using the notebook display as my primary and the LCD for reference guides/schematics/etc. Big boost to productivity and less mousing!

Do you run Linux? I have had no choice but to go back to using a single monitor.

Disclaimer for the zealots: For all the people that have had great luck with two monitors under Linux, I applaud you. I'm not suggesting that my experience is "normal". It's just my experience.

But dual monitors for me under Linux has been positively dreadful. X acts as though all 2D hardware acceleration is disabled when you bring up the second monitor. Window trailing is horrible. It acts as though it completely taxes the system for all but the most basic of tasks.

I actually created a little video to demonstrate the problem I have. I have posted this video to several message boards but no one has offered any solutions that have panned out.

Get the video here [davidcourtney.org] (Yes - it's windows media format ... I know jack squat about creating videos.)

I have experineced this problem with multiple distributions, multiple video cards, various video card driver versions, and various motherboards.

The relevant specs on my system are: AMD Athlon XP 3200+, 1GB of Dual Channel DDR RAM (2x512MB), AGP NVidia GeForce FX 5700 Ultra w/ 128MB of RAM, and PCI NVidia GeForce FX 5200 w/ 128MB of RAM. Have tried it with an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe 2.0 motherboard and an ASUS A7V880. Have also tried using an AGP ATI Radeon 9800 Pro and a PCI Radeon 7000. (have mixed and matched the 4 video cards in every way possible)

I've tried using the built-in drivers insead of the proprietary ones. I've tried enabling/disabling every feature that the video cards offer. Things like Side Band Addressing and Fast Writes.

The results are always the same. Single head is fine, dual head or Xinerama is unusably sluggish. All hardware runs flawlessly under WindowsXP with the second monitor enabled.

If you have new ideas - I'm all ears (er... eyes).

Re:Mod parent up too!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never seen such a blatant self-promoting assclown in my entire Slashdot life.

You must be new here. Sal is recent, guys like Roland Piquepaille have been promoting their shit here well before he came along. I really think that subscribers should be able to VOTE on stories while they are in the mysterious future...

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[tdemark]

I have 2 IBM P260 21" CRTs on my desk. I just happen to be messing with a plug-in electricity meter and discovered that each monitor requires .83 Amps, 99 VA, 98 W.

Assuming a 173.33 hours per month (2080 hours per year / 12 month per year), thats:

173.33 hrs /mo * 98 W * (1 kW / 1000 W) * (7 cents / kWh) = $1.19 / mo

If, in that month, I can get 40 seconds more work done due to the second monitor, the electricity will be paid for.

- Tony

photoshop loves dual monitors

[jason.hall]

As a long-time Photoshop user, I couldn't live without dual monitors. I use an LCD as my primary, and have a calibrated Lacie 19" CRT as a secondary. The only thing the CRT is used for is working on images - all the palettes and everything else is left on the LCD.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[jafomatic]

Hear here! Why didn't you login to post? This is a real comment; with insight, to boot!

I've had a pair of monitors at home (and another pair here at work) for quite a while and I too am thinking of adding a third.

There's plenty of things for that other monitor to display without resorting to movie playback.

• Email client, irc client, compiler progress, IM client, development environment, media player
• Email client, irc client, BT client, IM client, media player, game
• 800x600 browser, email client, irc client, IM client, development environment, media player
• query window, email client, IM client, media player, browser-containing-specifications, a few folders, etc

The list goes on, and on, and on...

dual monitor games

[Magius_AR]

Actually, it's a pain in the ass (if not impossible) to run a full-screen game on one monitor, and have the other available for other tasks in Windows.

If someone knows how to make this work, please lemme know. I've been on this quest for awhile.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[cyber0ne]

he's getting punished via the slashdot effect right about now

Or paid via advertising revenue from his site (I can't say for sure, it's not loading for me). Hopefully the /. editors will simply blacklist submissions pointing to his domain, since someone else in this thread pointed out that this is not his first offense.

I realize the temptation to submit geek-enticing articles to /. in order to drive traffic to one's site, but from the comments so far I'm being led to believe that the article has little more meat than, say, http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=307873 [microsoft.com]

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[jollespm]

I also have 3 monitors at work and I find it very useful. I had 2, but found an old graphics card in a discarded computer and figured I'd stick it in my current machine. I typically run simulations on 2 monitors, and email/chat on the third. I wouldn't bother doing it at home no matter how much I use it at work. At home I'm either playing games or doing 1 thing at a time.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[rxmd]

A two monitor setup was pretty common for the original IBM PC starting around 1981. The CGA and MDA (or Hercules) cards would address different memory. Many apps would use the MDA for one view and the CGA for the other. Spreadsheet on MDA, graph on CGA for many spreadsheets (remember, spreadsheets were the "killer app" of the era). Borland's IDEs used MDA for source, CGA for output.

Much more important: MDA for debugger!

IBM even allocated a register range for a secondary EGA card, so in theory it would have been possible to have two EGA or VGA cards running simultaneously under DOS.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[lspd]

Seriously though, I would rather have a multi-desktop window manager than two big monitors taking up my whole desk any day of the week, at least until I can afford a gigantomondo plasma TV that I can hang on the wall instead.

Multi-desktops don't do a thing for me. What is the use of a graphical application running in a window I can't see? Multi-desktops with a useable preview window might be worthwhile, but the way it's done in KDE/Gnome right now is worthless.

Multiple monitors...that's a different story. Put your IDE in one monitor and your web browser (for documentation) on the other. Leave Kontact running in one monitor while you're screwing around on Slashdot in the other. GTK-Gnutella or Pan in one monitor while you're watching a movie on the second. Once you've been using a multi-monitor desktop for a while, you'll find it annoying to work on a system with a single monitor.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[tuba_dude]

There was a point at which I had four monitors. When I was doing something useful, the first monitor was work, second was documentation, third was communication (email, IM clients, etc) and the fourth had system monitors. I probably have several forms of cancer now, since three of them were old CRTs that I bummed from friends. During that time, I very rarely used Alt-Tab, and only sometimes had overlapping windows. It was nice. I usually think of it like this: One monitor is like having a school desk, two is like a nice office desk or workbench. I just went with an entire conference room. Excessive? Yes. Geeky? Without a doubt.

My Work Setup

[Wise Dragon]

At work, I have a setup to die for. At my far left, I have my laptop, docked. At my far right, I have an HP 1825 18" LCD, which displays at 1280x1024. This I use intermittently as a console to various linux machines. Center-left and Center are a pair of HP 2025 20" LCDs at 1600x1200. These are hooked up to an HP Itanium 2 Workstation through some kind of dual head ATI card. It runs Debian and it my primary work machine. Center-right is an HP 2035 20" LCD display connected to an HP xw8000 workstation running Windows and various proprietary apps.

This setup pretty much takes up my entire horizontal field of view, plus a bit. I usually have the entire surface tiled with various apps and terminals and rarely have anything minimized or hidden behind something else. I have about 6 terminal windows open to a shared GNU screen session. Mozilla runs in the upper-left. Irssi's extra-wide terminal runs below it. Evolution runs on the left half of the right monitor. The rest is all terminals.

All of this is hooked together with synergy2, though I don't leave it on all the time.

The next evolution of this setup will be to run all of the displays from one linux box and use rdesktop to remote an 800x600 windows display.

As many have mentioned, LCDs are easier on the eyes than CRTS. They also take up less desk space and are decreasing rapidly in price. Drawbacks include poor contrast ratios, limited resolution, and price. Still being a developer I wouldn't go back to manual context switching. If you have any questions about this setup, please feel free to ask. I'd be happy to post, for example, my XF86Config file.

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[Jim_Maryland]

You may be interested then in multi-head displays from PanoramTech [panoramtech.com]. We tried their 3 headed displays for a demo environment and it was well received by analyst who typically leave their main application up on one, a web search on the second, and email, reporting tools,and other apps on the last screen. While not practical for all users, multiple screens have their use.

shenanigans!

[spoonyfork]

The submitter is "backBeat" [e-mail]. According to whois.net [whois.net] the domain xyzcomputing.com is registered to Salvatore Cangeloso. It would appear that submitter submitted something from their own website, perhaps written by themselves but passed off as someone else. So what, you ask. Look how the /. article is worded.

This is a descriptive a article about one man and his dual monitor odyssey. After reading the snippet I had to read the article....

Sal has done this before on 9/29/04 [slashdot.org]. Heck, he got a mention for it with regards to slashdotting in this Wired article [wired.com]. This article was submitted by SpaceCanary but with the [e-mail] email address. This /. article is also worded oddly, as if he was just some random surfer who stumbled upon the article:

I recently read this open letter to Windows and I think it's pretty funny. The guy writes a letter...

A search through Slashdot [slashdot.org] revealed only these two articles containing xyzcomputing but I have no doubt he'll strike again. I wonder if this is an example of slashvertising [wikipedia.org].

I call shenanigans!

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[natet]

How about a multi-desktop window manager AND two medium sized monitors(19" lcd's). That is the setup I currently use at work, and I'm in love! It works especially well for Java development, because I can have the language docs open on one monitor while my editor is open on the other, and I'm not constantly flipping back and forth between them, and interrupting my train of thought to go back and look at what the language docs said. With the multiple desktops, I put other applications that I need to use, but only at infrequent intervals (such as my email program). That way I can switch to them quickly, and then get back to my development window without having to flip through a number of other applications to get back to my editor/browser setup. It works very well, a definite productivity improvement!

Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ

[lspd]

Just because you can turn your head instead of activating a "switch virtual desktop" command doesn't make it any less of a switch of attention.

Very true, but the difference between noticing a state change out of the corner of your eye and noticing a state changes after a few key presses is dramatic to me. The multi-desktop paging idea that Gnome and KDE are trying to sell would work if the preview windows into the background desktops were large enough to notice when something changes in those desktops. I could almost see working with a multi-desktop system where one of the two monitors I'm using is filled with four 1/4 scale preview windows looking into the other desktops. I'd still want the option of having one of those desktops fill the second screen when it's preferrable to have two full screens. When I want to use IDE and Browser for instance. YMMV. Choice is a beautiful thing.