October 14, 2011 at 8:35 am
2 or more monitors hands down. For awhile I worked at a company where I had 2 big beautiful widescreen monitors (24" apiece I think) and I hated working from home because I had to remote in on my home PC through a single 19 inch flatscreen. My productivity dropped and whenever I would remote into the server through RDP, I would have to log out, change my screen settings for RDP and log back in because it was trying to use the widescreen settings. I was constantly moving and resizing windows and it took noticeably longer to get things done. Since I now work for a company where I work from home more, they gave me a laptop and the combination of widescreen laptop screen plus the 19" flatscreen gives me enough space to work with. I actually took my docking station for the laptop home so I could hook both monitors up and a keyboard. My productivity has increased and frustration decreased. It would be even better if I could get the advanced port replicator and hook up 2 24" monitors and not bother with the laptop screen.
October 14, 2011 at 8:52 am
Two monitors works best for me. I keep production on one and test/dev on the other so I always know which environment I'm working in. I also agree with many of the posts regarding working from home on a laptop.....productivity is significantly decreased with a single screen.
October 14, 2011 at 9:14 am
I was surprised not to see a point that I think is far more important: larger, higher resolution monitors = less eyestrain. One large monitor or two is less important to me than the resolution(s) of the monitor(s).
Besides aging, one of the downfalls of having an IT job is staring at a monitor for 8 or more hours/day (usually far more than 8!) In the long run, that has an additional negative impact on your vision.
Lower resolution monitors cause a lot of squinting in order to read all the characters correctly (misread a configuration value on a website and that section doesn't work right...) Squinting all day long gives me a whopper of a headache by the end of the day.
I've been working in the field for decades and believe me, eyestrain takes its toll in productivity over the years. IMHO, at today's pricing a large hi-res monitor or 2 smaller hi-res monitors are a small investment for the significant productivity gains a company would realize from that investment.
October 14, 2011 at 9:14 am
I'm back to one screen (1920x1200 19") on my laptop till windows rearranges/remembers the windows when the extra monitor is missing/reattached (perhaps winsplit revolution could help).
With windows 7 you can easily dock a window to a side and that is enough for now.
We also have one big "monitor" in our room where major notifications are displayed.
October 14, 2011 at 9:18 am
With the price of monitors being so low, I'd say get what you like. I recently broke down and bought two identical 23" monitors. Shipped from New Egg it was under $300. Love it!
Honestly I don't get why companies can be so stingy about the tools people have to work with. I sit in front of a computer 8 hours a day. I'm getting what I need to be efficient, period!
October 14, 2011 at 9:39 am
I've been running 3 screens - main laptop display @ 1920x1200 perched on a high stand, secondary 19" in the back of the laptop, and third 17" screen hanging off a £30 USB adapter. Apart from the 'you think you're in swordfish' comments from the more low-brow people i work with, it's a lovely setup. SSMS in the middle (object explorer + registered servers undocked for additional space, of course), outlook+messenger on the left, web+docs on the right.
Highly recommended to all.
October 16, 2011 at 6:16 pm
Laptop sits beside 22 inch wide screen connected to the dock. Dock sits on a desktop, hooked up to another 22 incher. Control from one mouse and keyboard of 2 machines using Input Director. One happy Vegemite, though there are often comments about greed.
October 17, 2011 at 8:34 am
At home I use one wide screen. It's actually the best of both worlds when you combine it with a simple app like SplitView, which gives you the same kind of control you would have with 2 monitors, but also allows you to use the entire screen for a single app when the need arises.
This works really well. Part of my day involves working with complex diagrams (mostly UML), which would be VERY difficult on 2 smaller screens. When I switch back to developing, however, the split screen setup then wortks better.
I use a 28" right now, but may jump up to a 32.
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Your lack of planning does not constitute an emergency on my part...unless you're my manager...or a director and above...or a really loud-spoken end-user..All right - what was my emergency again?
October 17, 2011 at 9:46 am
I agree 2 monitors are great and three would be ideal.
😀
October 28, 2011 at 6:03 am
I had two at work, but gave one back as it did not work for me as I suffered from headaches and eye pains due to that. One large monitor is definitely my preference, but I appreciate to hear that most others here work well with two.
I rather stick to a low res, comparably small 8 years old monitor although I work with 4+ apps in parallel permanently. I have no issues switching the sessions on the task bar or simply with the ALT-TAB key.
brgds
Philipp Post
October 28, 2011 at 2:15 pm
When I started my current job, I had a single monitor. Company policy is for everyone to have a single monitor. But there was a spare monitor sitting in the corner. So I borrowed it, and bought a specialist graphics card on eBay - get this - USING MY OWN MONEY. Twenty quid well spent.
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