Dave Donaldson

Living the 3-Monitor Good Life

Saturday, October 06 2007

I've always been fairly productive working from home, mostly because I'm always using a dual-monitor setup where my primary display is my laptop and the secondary display is a 17" LCD. Heck, I even bought a spare 17" LCD a couple years ago to take with me to client sites where I was working. I simply cannot do work for any length of time with only one monitor.

However, now that I work from home full-time I wanted to make sure I configured my workspace in such a way that truly maximizes productivity. Part of that was really wanting to add that spare 17" LCD to my existing setup and run three monitors. Luckily, Telligent was nice enough to send me a brand-spanking new Dell Latitude D830 with a super-nice nVidia display adapter that could handle what I wanted to do (I didn't even know the laptop was coming, it just showed up - that's how you take care of your developers).

But of course you can't hook up two external monitors to a laptop as-is. So Jayme pointed me to Matrox, which makes what they call Graphics Expansion Modules that go by the name of either DualHead2Go or TripleHead2Go (for both VGA and DVI adapters). These little boxes of love allow you to add two or even three additional external monitors to your computer, thus greatly expanding your total viewing area. Installation is simple: install their software and plug the monitors into the box. That's it. I'm now running two 17" LCDs as a single display with a resolution of 2560x1024 (i.e. two 1280x1024 resolutions combined into one) and the laptop display as the third monitor, as shown below (the laptop on the left is my personal laptop and is not part of the configuration):

That wallpaper you see, which is the glow of a planet, I think really shows off the display area and is extremely cool to see in person. If you're thinking about doing something similar and using one of the Matrox boxes, I highly suggest you download and run their system compatibility tool first. Not all graphics cards can support this type of configuration, especially those in laptops because they are not usually as high-end as ones you find in desktops. So do your homework before shelling out your time and money (I spent $169 for the DualHead2Go Analog box, but it's one of the best $169 I've ever spent).