EuHua.com

Just a week or two ago, my friend asked me about attaching multiple monitor to a single computer, and I think it’s an interesting topic to discuss.

Why two monitor? Well, if you are a heavy application user, you may find at times switching between different applications waste some of your precious time. Especially when you have lower resolution screens like 1024 X 768, which means you can only place very limited amount (normally two application windows) of windows on the desktop. By combining two monitor, you can have a wider desktop area to place more applications to get your job done.

So, if your graphics card have two output ports, like a DVI and a VGA port, you have an extra monitor, why not try it. If you have two graphics cards, it is likely that you can connect up to 4 monitors at the same time.

In my case, I connect my notebook VGA port to my external LCD monitor. By extending my desktop to an external display, I can run my movies on the screen on my laptop, and my MSN chat message windows on the external display.

And here’s a scenario, I often need to switch between Photoshop for designs, Windows Explorer showing the image filenames that I have created, and another screen with Notepad++ for web page development. With two screens, I can improve my coding time because I do not have to click on the taskbar, and switch between these applications and remembering the loads of filenames that I have created to be typed in my HTML documents, as I can refer the load of filenames I have created on a second screen.

Once you hook up the two monitors to your graphics card, you will need to play a bit of the settings in your Display Properties.

Then, right click on the second display icon and activate the second screen. Make sure you check the option “Extend the desktop onto this monitor”, so you can drag different application windows across the screens. Well, it is time to put that old monitor into some use.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 8th, 2008 at 6:22 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.