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Years ago, I had two machines on my desktop, and two large, bulky monitors as well. Later on, I was able to toggle between the systems using only one monitor, but still, they were two separate systems. In recent years, I have preferred my own Toshiba laptop to any of the systems offered at my workplace. My laptop has all my tools and scripts and such, and also has remarkable power: I can run virtual servers, Oracle, and lots of other browsing and email applications without any performance hit. In the last couple months, however, I have been using my laptop with a second monitor. (Many machines cannot support multiple monitors and require a newer graphics card like an ATI or nVidia to do so.)

There’s a lot of research on the topic. Most people, given the opportunity to use two monitors, would not consider going back to one. The productivity increase has been pretty well documented, both scientifically (through amount of actual work performed and through testing things like eye movement) and anecdotally. Coders especially enjoy one window for writing code and another for checking out the results.

I began using this setup a couple months ago at work using my laptop and a Dell flat-panel. I especially liked that the mouse travels seamlessly between the two monitors. And yes, I find it is much easier to keep things like my browser and IM windows on one screen while the other can be used more for writing. I found a program called UltraMon by RealtimeSoft which extends my computer’s ability to use multiple monitors (including trivial things such as which screensaver to play on each monitor, whether or not to display task bars in different windows, and so on). UltraMon is free for thirty days and then costs US $39 for a single-user license.

For working at home now, this past week I picked up a remarkably brilliant and clear Samsung 17-inch flat-panel for only $180 at BestBuy. Certainly worth the price of admission. And no, I would never go back to a single-monitor system.