Most people don’t even think about it but it is really pretty easy to have more than one monitor connected to your computer. There are a lot of advantages to having multiple monitors. You can be much more productive in many ways and save a lot of time.

Just using one monitor can give you limitations. The smaller the area you have to work with, the more you will be switching from window to window and seeing less at a time. If you just add another monitor (or two, or three, or four, or five, or…….), the window swapping goes away.

This picture is of one of my setups. It is a Linux system running six 19 inch monitors all running at 1600×1200 resolution. This is the equivalent real estate of a monitor that can do (3×1600)x(2×1200) or 4800×2400. Have you ever seen a monitor with that kind of resolution? It is VERY nice. For Linux, the graphical server process (Xfree86) has an option for multiple monitors called xinerama.

Microsoft Windows has multiple monitor capability built in as well. It is really simple to set up. You just plug in the monitors and Windows detects them and gives you a little grid of the locations of the monitors and you can just move them around on the grid to specify where each of the monitors are physically located. Apple OS X also supports multiple monitors.

In addition to having the monitors, you must have video cards that have multiple output ports on each card or you can have multiple video cards (or a combination of both). If you have more than one video card, you are usually better off if they are the same make and model. Or, at least the same hardware chip set.

The capability of multiple monitors has been available for years but was a bit expensive to have a nice setup in the beginning. When multiple monitor setups started taking off, flat screens were brand new and REALLY expensive. Even large CRT (cathode ray tube) monitors were still too pricey for the average consumer to afford several. Video cards that had more than one video port were also expensive. Now, with the rapid price drop of nice flat screen monitors and many video cards coming standard with dual ports, it is a lot more affordable to have a multi-monitor setup.

With all of those monitors you can edit your blog images, read your email, visit your favorite blogs, monitor your blog web server access log, edit your latest sales page, code up some PHP, access your database, and just about whatever else you want to do all at the same time without having to hide or minimize any windows. Now that is productivity!

- Hill Robertson