Snapshot of my Desktop

Forget about RAM and processing speed, if you’re looking for THE largest boost in terms of productivity, get dual monitors. I’d happily downgrade my processor or RAM before i’d surrender one of my 20″ widescreen monitors.

In terms of screen real estate, i have 40 inches when in reality i have 2 x 20 inches. It’s a bit like owning two semi-detached houses (side by side). You don’t say you own one detached house, you say you own 2 semi detached houses.

Now some of you might say why not knock down walls and just have one large house? Well you can do that, you can buy a 40″ LCD screen if you want above 2 x 20″ LCD’s – fine. HOWEVER, in terms of productivity and revenue, you can rent out more rooms with two houses, plus the two houses are physically separated – meaning, crucially, you can run the two houses independently of each other. You can have a full blown house party going on in one whilst you use the other as a B and B.

With one house, you can’t expect to throw a house party whilst running a B and B – the two will overlap and interfere with each other. You have noise, distractions, unhappy guests etc… With two houses however, you can get away with it.

And this is the idea behind two seperate monitors rather than 1 large monitor – two monitors, believe it or not, are easier to control as you know their physical limits and boundaries. With one large monitor, you do not know how to divide it up… do you cut it up in to 4 squares, 2 halves? With dual monitors you don’t have to worry about that as you don’t have to divide anything up and mess with settings or software controls.

Check out this picture to see what i mean and for a classic example of how you would benefit from the use of two monitors.

On one monitor, i’m editing /writing this blog post you’re reading now. On the other, i’m previewing it in a browser to see if it all looks ok. Saves me time and energy. Or alternatively i could be sending an email on one monitor whilst doing research and getting information on the other monitor. It’s all about speed my friends and it always will be when dealing with technology.

We’ll never have fast enough processors, memory, broadband etc… why? Because that would mean software that uses these technologies would have to stop improving and being added to. That’s not gonna happen, so speed is always a problem. Dual monitors have probably doubled the speed I work at and that’s no exaggeration 😉