If you’re deciding which new keyboard or mouse you should splurge on next, forget it. Your next investment should be a new monitor. What’s magical about a new monitor is that anyone – not just the power users, can benefit from a secondary display.
Screen estate is precious for the most of us. A single screen can quickly get cluttered with innumerable tabs, documents, videos, virtual machines, settings panes, development environments…you get the idea. You can mitigate the problem somewhat by creating virtual workspaces in Linux or Virtual Desktops in Windows 10, but it’s still frustrating to hop back and forth between screens when juggling multiple documents.
This is why you need an extra monitor. But, if the idea of extra screen real estate isn’t alluring enough to convince you, here are some more reasons for you to chew on.
1. Easy Comparison
Do you research, write code, compose articles, or deal with text in general? With an extra monitor, you can fit four half-width windows all at once, or two full-width windows side-by-side. No more furiously scrolling and squinting through pages for info.
2. Divide and conquer
Having two or more screens allow you to isolate programs of the same category into its own screen. You can push all your social media pages, email, and chat clients on to your secondary screen to make room for more important stuff on the main screen.
3. It’s pretty cheap
You can nab a decent 1080p monitor today for a little over $100. Monitors are no longer the $200, $300 or $400 devices they used to be.
4. Notifications at a glance
Ever heard your Skype notification go off while using a fullscreen application but dreaded alt-tabbing out? Yeah, we’ve been there too. With the addition of a second monitor, all you have to do is glance at the second screen to see who sent you kisses.
5. All your programs support it
Don’t worry about things not working as today’s operating systems and programs all have extensive support for multiple monitors.
6. Impress your guests
What’s better than one screen to show off your baby (or puppy) pictures? That’s right, two screens! Having multiple monitors also lets you gloat unrealistically about your work ethic.”I work so hard that I need two monitors” is a surefire way for you to earn extra brownie points from grandma.
And there’s more to be discovered! There’s so many other ways to use a secondary monitor, but hopefully, we’ve done enough convincing here for you to grab yourself a second monitor. If you’re worried about the base of the monitor taking up too much space on your desk, be sure to check out some monitor arms as well.
Do you run two monitors? Do you run 3 monitors? What do you do with them? Sound off in the comments below!
For several years i am using a system with two monitors and I can say that it is too convenient! I’m constantly working with massive spreadsheets and documents, and the use of multiple monitors saves about 30% of my working time. The only negative that I would like to point out is the lack of options in Windows for adding a taskbar to the secondary monitor. I solved this problem by a third-party software named Actual Multiple Monitors. With it my system has become really ideal. So i cant say any more just recommend everyone to use dual/triple monitors system.