Twice the screen, twice the productivity: another reason I won’t go back to XP
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in Toys & gadgets, Hardware, Microsoft on
The more you can see, the more you can do. I used to work in front of two 17″ monitors; the gap between the screens where the bezel interrupted the view just vanished from my vision and all I saw was a lot of Web pages, Word documents, spreadsheets and emails. A couple of years back, I damaged my ankle and couldn’t comfortably sit at a desk for several months and even when I could, I found I preferred working in a big recliner chair. A 17″ laptop was ideal but mostly I work on 12″ or 12.1″ widescreen notebooks - currently it’s an HP 2710p because it has such excellent battery life. My elderly Athlon had started crashing every 20 minutes with a hardware failure and besides, I didn’t want to go back to XP, so I put up with the smaller, single screen. Occasionally I’ve tried two laptops side by side - usually when I was reviewing one of them - but the switch from keyboard to keyboard is very disruptive.
I’d seen the DisplayLink technology before but it was seeing the wireless USB setup at CES this year that gave me the inspiration. If I could link my notebook to my two 17″ screens by wireless USB I could easily go back to twin screens without worrying about dealing with yet another cable. So we started juggling the office, to put my chair closer to Simon’s desk and with a flat surface where monitors could stand. This involved replacing a wall-mounted bookcase that would have tapped me on the head and I spent a happy Easter weekend decoupaging a pair of wooden Ikea drawers to put the monitors at comfortable eye height (they’d sat by an open window during one rainy summer and got very grimy).
Today we started hooking things up. Turns out two screens will really need some kind of wall-mount, hopefully on an extending bracket at an angle.I don’t have the wireless USB connection just yet so I’ll save DisplayLink for when I get the wall-mount and want two external screens and put up with a VGA cable for now. I’ve already used a strip of Velcro to mate the power and Ethernet cables so one more isn’t much more unwieldy.
For now, there’s one monitor perched on my right. This isn’t the same as screens side by side - but it’s ideal for parking a PowerPoint I plan to refer to or a Webex meeting I’m taking notes on. It came in very handy juggling hotel details and conference schedules for a trip, and then for having the details of last-minute cash ISA deals where I wouldn’t get distracted by them while I was on the phone talking about the next version of Windows Mobile. I can put my inbox over there and have messages and documents I’m writing in front of me.
And Vista (or the Intel graphics driver or most probably the combination of the two) does a really good job of handling applications on multiple windows - far better than XP and my old Matrox card. With the Matrox card, I had one VGA port and one DVI port with a VGA adapter in. Absolutely fine - except that I could only watch video on the left screen; video streams on the right screen were black boxes. And Windows extended my desktop onto the second screen and pretended I had one huge monitor. That meant maximising a window painted it across both screens and dialog boxes popped up in the ‘middle’ of the extended screen - cut in half between the two displays and very hard to absorb.
Now, applications maximise to fill the screen they’re on to start with and dialogs stay on the screen they belong with. If I close an application, unplug the laptop and go out, come back to the office and open the same application - the window opens at the same size and on the same monitor as the last time.
Internet Explorer still has a bad habit of pushing new windows onto the other screen - it’s always wanted to sprawl over the whole desktop like a cat on a Sunday newspaper - but nine times out of ten, if a page opens a new window it’s something I want to work on straight away anyway or I would have forced it into a new tab. I shall update the release candidate of SP1 to the release version of SP1 soon and then I can install the beta of IE 8 and see if that’s any more polite.
I’ve only had a second monitor for about four hours and I’ve got twice as much tinkering and timewasting done as usual. Now I shall settle down to some real work and although I won’t get twice as much done, I’m certainly expecting the extra real estate to make a real difference.
-Mary
Rated: 26.67% (3 votes)
Loading ...Comment by JonW - March 31, 2008 on 11:24 am
I don’t see this as a reason to diss XP and promote Vista over it. I have this set up running on now on an XP machine with 2 x 19″ monitors with none of the problems you describe. I have two independent desktops within which windows can be maximized to take up only one monitor not across both monitors. I suggest the issue you had was with your graphics card not the OS being used.
Comment by Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe - March 31, 2008 on 11:42 am
That’s a lot more functionality than I’ve seen with any multi-monitor setup in XP; Simon used both ATI and NVIDIA cards and had the same issues with maximising. It’s good that one graphics card manufacturer has worked out how to do it, but the point I should have made more clearly about Vista is that while Aero isn’t the graphics subsystem we were promised, the Desktop Windows Manager is a lot more capable, so it’s easier for graphics drivers to work with it. Integrated Intel graphics is the lowest common denominator and it still gets it right.
-Mary
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