I am. I love multiple monitor setups. I have for a long time. At one point I had three 21″ monitors and a 14″ laptop all in a row, and I loved it. These days, I’ve ditched the humongous 21″ CRTs for a single 24″ Dell LCD aside my 15″ MBP, but sometimes I really miss the wide open space of that massive 4800×1200 desktop. I’m using a Mac most often these days, and it is amazingly intelligent when it comes to switching back and forth from dual monitors to the single laptop screen, but back when I lived in Windoze land, I would occasionally get some weirdness when I switched from dual monitor more to single monitor mode, and an application or two would get lost off the edge of the screen. At the time, I usually futzed around with things for a while until either giving up or successfully performing the magic keyboard and mouse incantation to get my screen back, but if only I had had this article at the time, I would’ve been much happier and had much more reliable results. Craig at Codejacked has done an excellent job of showing you exactly what to do to rescue your application from the purgatory that exists where your second monitor should be.
For those of you that are unsure about joining the dual monitor club, there is plenty of research out there that clearly shows that using two monitors will make you smarter, taller, stronger, thinner, and more productive (ok, ok, only that last part about being more productive is true). The NY Times had an article last year about how wonderful they are, and if you google “dual monitor productivity” you’ll get a ton of hits expounding on how great dual monitors really are. It shouldn’t be hard to convince your boss to kick down for an extra head when there is so much evidence that says he will get more work out of you if he does (and he’ll make you happier too, which always helps).
And when you are ready to make the join the dual monitor club, PC World has a good little how to on getting it done.
P.S. Later this week I’ll be posting some additional tips for multiple monitor setups, including my favorite, which controls multiple PCs from the same keyboard and mouse on multiple monitors. And I WISH my desk were as clean as the one in that photo, but that’ll never happen.
