Lately I have been doing a fair bit of website design while down at my girlfriends house. The problem with this being the size of my laptop. It’s only a 13.1″ screen and is quite difficult to do any sort of design on. I do manage, but I struggle.

At home I normally use a better setup, my home-built quad-core desktop with dual 24″ monitors. (Yes, I did get identical, I had to)

Where would I be without these 2 monitors? The setup is perfect for designing websites. On one screen I can have a maximised Netbeans screen, allowing me to view a large amount of lines of code, while on the other screen I can have a 1920×1200 resolution view of the website I am designing. There is no need to be switching between applications, a simple right click upload on Netbeans means I can drag the mouse over to the other screen, refresh and my changes are there.

One of the other benefits of dual screens comes when using a Virtual Machine. I run Ubuntu on my desktop and so using Internet Explorer is only done (Without WINE) through a Virtual Machine running XP. This means that on my 2nd screen I can run Firefox and Internet explorer, the 2 main browsers I have to consider. There is no more need to run my desktop and my laptop at the same time, I can simply run the Virtual Machine when I need to test the website on IE.

It’s all well me saying that dual monitors are all that – but do they really improve your work rate? Do they actually make you work better?

Microsoft investigated in their article “Two Screens Are Better Than One”, Microsoft found that using multiple screens can increase the users productivity of between 9 and 50%. Not only is it better to have a multiple screens, but it is also cheaper to buy 2 smaller screens rather than buying 1 large screen.

After using multiple screens for a while now, I do not believe it would be possible for me to work well without 2 screens. I may even move on to tri-monitors!

On a site note – they’re great for ‘watching while you’re working’! I can sit in front of my computer, watch my favorite episode of Family Guy while doing my work – what could be better?

Jack

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