Lloyd Alter
I have a 23" monitor plus the notebook screen
Many people are still looking electron guns in the face with CRT screens, which use a lot of power and take up a lot of space. Many others made the investment in flat screen monitors a few years ago and are working on 15" and 17" monitors. Now that the prices of monitors have dropped so much, perhaps it is time to consider getting a second monitor; a few years ago, Ivan Berger wrote in the New York Times:
Survey after survey shows that whether you measure your productivity in facts researched, alien spaceships vaporized, or articles written, adding an extra monitor will give your output a considerable boost- 20 percent to 30 percent, according to a survey by Jon Peddie Research.
But running a second monitor uses twice as much power as running one, and there is now a better alternative: get a BIG monitor, like 23" or 24", as long as you can fully display two full windows side by side. According to a study published in the Wall Street Journal (which noted that the study was paid for by a monitor company, NEC):
Researchers at the University of Utah tested how quickly people performed tasks like editing a document and copying numbers between spreadsheets while using different computer configurations: one with an 18-inch monitor, one with a 24-inch monitor and with two 20-inch monitors. Their finding: People using the 24-inch screen completed the tasks 52% faster than people who used the 18-inch monitor; people who used the two 20-inch monitors were 44% faster than those with the 18-inch ones.
A 24" monitor uses a lot less power than two smaller monitors. If you have someone in the family still using a CRT, pass the smaller one on to them and reap even more savings. NEC says that the productivity savings amount to 2.5 hours per day, which if you don't fill with more work will save a lot of energy.
NOTE: We have used the monitor size for convenience, but the real number to look for is the resolution, or pixels. Many monitors within a few inches of each other can have the same number of pixels; 17, 18 or 19 inch monitors can all be 1600 x 1200 and all will deliver the same amount of visual information. Similarly, 23 or 24 inch monitors can be 1920 pixels wide. The pixel count is in fact the most important measure of how much information you get. The Wall Street Journal also found that productivity started to go down when monitor size got much above 24"; evidently we start looking all over the place, the field of view is too big for the distance we are from the monitor.
