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As a blogger and occasional developer,it is pretty stupid that it took me this long to setup my dual monitor rig.

I have always been working with one 19” monitor for 5 years. For me, I don’t really see the productivity improvement in having a 22” or 24” monitor and you have to drag the windows all over the place.

And it seems I am not the only one who thinks that way. Jeff Atwood from Coding Horror thinks that using smaller multi monitor displays enables you to work in a windowless environment.

Users of 30-inch monitors face the terrible, terrible problem of how to effectively use all of that space. You don’t often want to maximise a folder or document window on a screen this big; either you’ll end up with a lot of white space and important program buttons separated by a vast expanse of nothing, or you’ll get lines of text 300 or more characters long, which are difficult to read.

My setup is cheap. I got an acquaintance whose brother is offloading a 19” analog monitor for $50. Yes, its stupid to get an analog monitor these days,but my objective is that I do not want to spend greater than X amount of money on a new one or a relatively new one.

Due to a previously botch deal, my actual price of this setup is only $30.

Let me just say the productivity improvement just went up many times! I can craft this article while referencing another article without alternate tabbing.

I can occasionally, play a video drama on one screen and surf net on the other.

I do encourage most of you to do this. The recommendation is to go on Craigslist and find a cheap monitor.

  1. Monitors have longer lifespan than you think
  2. The bigger monitor you get the more electricity consume, so that’s why I am perfectly fine with a 19”
  3. It is difficult to get a super faulty monitor that you cannot make use of second hand. Most of the time its button faults. Even with one deal pixel it is very functional.

Scale up productivity further with windows splitter app like WinSplit Revolution

What I further recommend is to install this nifty freeware call WinSplit Revolution.

What is it for? WinSplit Revolution is a small utility which allows you to easily organize your open windows by tiling, resizing and positioning them to make the best use of your desktop real estate.

What can it do? WinSplit is especially useful for high-end LCD screens with high resolutions because it helps you to efficiently manage many active windows. For example WinSplit is useful for owners of the Dell 2407FPW monitor. As you can see in the screenshots above, the advantages of using WinSplit is that it saves you from having to drag and drop windows by allowing you to snap windows into specific tiled configurations using simple keyboard hotkeys.

The game changer is when you tie it to desktop shortcuts or hotkeys.

You can use custom templates to setup

  1. where you position the windows. anchor it to a side of the screen.
  2. the size of your windows

Best of all it works on dual monitors! Take a look at this video to understand it better.

I urge everyone to consider setting up your desktop setup this way. What do you guys think?