I got my first computer back in the early 1980s. It wasn't until just a couple of months ago that the advantages of having my computer desktop stretched across dual monitors dawned on me.
This is pretty amazing when I think of it. For years I ran a computer graphics business with other members of my family. One of my jobs was to design the network and keep the computers running. We had lots of them, and we were completely dependent on them. We had probably 30 or 40 at any given time. Many of our staff worked on very large, complex projects that required detailed work on books, magazines, newspapers, full colour brochures...
I can't remember once ever thinking, "Hey it might be easier for Andy or Jeff or Dave or Johanna to work on these projects if they had an extended work surface. It didn't occur to me, and it didn't occur to them either, as far as I can remember.
We had big 21 inch monitors of course. But that's not what I'm talking about. I mean hooking up two monitors to the same computer and using the "extended desktop" feature built into Windows. As far as I know that feature has been part of Windows almost from the beginning. I'm sure the same goes for the Mac.
I first gave this feature a serious tryout about three months ago when I started using my laptop because my main "production" machine started having a virus problem. Even though I have a great notebook, it is still relatively hard to work with in a production setting. It's got that dinky keyboard and a limited screen space, so I needed a solution.
In our office we write articles, create blogs, work on websites, and create videos for clients. It was the video stuff that was most annoying when working with the small screen. You're constantly moving windows around, bringing stuff to the front, moving stuff to the back, closing and opening windows. The same things goes for accounting. All those windows with nowhere to put them.
Then it dawned on me. Why not hook another monitor up and create an extended desktop? To tell you the truth, I wasn't even sure if this would work the way I wanted it to. What I hoped it would do was keep the left screen for active jobs, and move inactive windows - like my email program - over to the screen on the right. Or when I was creating videos, move the video preview window over to the right so I didn't have to keep moving things around to get at the timeline.
Surprise, surprise... getting the two monitor thing to work turned out to be easier than I expected. And the split desktop has turned out to be more useful than I anticipated. Now there's no way I will be setting up another serious "workstation" for myself or anybody else in our office without two monitors.
For anybody who uses a computer a lot, or has a staff member who is expected to do multiple jobs at once, this is probably the most useful upgrade going.
