Two heads are better than one

Or three or four. The quest for the biggest monitor follows the road to very expensive credit card bills. Does size really matter?

The one things geeks can never get enough of is pixels. Walk down the aisles of many software development cube farms and you'll see 21-inch monitors running at 1600×1200 resolution. Developers need a lot of desktop real estate, not so much for single large windows but for lots of little different windows: code editors, resource editors, form editors, watch windows, call stack windows, online documentation, database monitors, and so forth are all commonly required -- usually simultaneously -- while coding and debugging a typical application.

The traditional approach to getting more pixels is to grow out: get a bigger monitor and if necessary, a video card capable of higher resolution. 21-inch monitors are increasingly common on new systems and increasingly inexpensive, to the point where it's possible to get a good quality 21-inch monitor for under $1000. But even 21-inch monitors can hold only so many pixels. For example, the 21-inch monitor on my system can handle up to 1600×1200 without a problem. My eyes, on the other hand, are more comfortable at 1280×1024.

And that's the crux of the matter: There's an upper limit as to how many pixels you can squeeze on a monitor comfortably, even with large monitors and young eyes. It doesn't help that most video cards and monitors jump from 1280×1024 to 1600×1200 -- an almost 50 percent jump. The typical jump from 1024×768 to 1280×1024 is even worse: 67 percent more pixels. An intermediate jump might help you get the number of pixels you need without eyestrain or headaches. (The Matrox Millennium card on my home system supports 1152×864, which for my eyes is just right on a 17-inch monitor.)

Two-dimensional thinking

So if expanding out isn't the answer, what about expanding up or sideways? Multiple monitors have been common on Macs and CAD workstations for years. Microsoft finally added multiple-monitor support to Windows 98...but wait, you say. Only a crazy person would use Windows 98 as a development platform. Well, you might have a point. Though Windows 98 is more stable than Windows 95, it's still not a system I'd recommend for development.

Nevertheless, Windows 98's multiple-monitor support is about as easy as it gets. Adding a second monitor is usually as simple as plugging in the second video card and hooking it up to a monitor. If drivers for the card on the Windows 98 CD, they'll be automatically installed and you'll be able to configure the second monitor from Display Properties. Sometimes you'll have to get an updated driver from the manufacturer -- not all the video drivers on the Windows 98 (or Windows 98 Second Edition, for that matter) CD are multi-monitor-ready. 

Windows 98 goes to great lengths to ensure that applications stay usable with multiple monitors. For example, the GetSystemMetrics API function returns the dimensions of the primary monitor instead of the dimensions of the whole virtual desktop covering all the monitors. (That's why you might have seen tooltips for a window on a secondary monitor appearing on the primary monitor.) Windows maximize within the monitor they're on, not over all monitors. You can even run each monitor at its own resolution, color depth, and refresh rate.

Windows 2000 has multiple-monitor support too and it works much the same way Windows 98's support works. Rumors that it was one of the features cut from Windows 2000 after RC1 are false.

In the meantime

Until Windows 2000 ships (and maybe a service pack has been released), what do you do? Windows NT 4.0 does not support multiple monitors. However, some video card manufacturers have written drivers for Windows NT that support multiple monitors. Diamond's Viper V330 supports multiple monitors under Windows NT, each running off one V330. Matrox's drivers for its Millennium and Mystique lines also support multiple monitors.

There are some drawbacks to multi-monitor support being solely in the driver rather than in both the OS and the driver. On my personal system, which runs Windows NT 4.0, service pack 4, and two Matrox Millennium cards, I frequently see windows and dialog boxes appear in the middle of the virtual desktop -- in other words, with the left half appearing on one monitor and the right half appearing on the other. Maximized windows don't behave exactly the same as they do under Windows 98 and Windows 2000. Matrox's driver has options to try to fix those problems, but they're not always successful. 

Because Windows NT doesn't support multiple monitors, the tricks Windows 98 and Windows 2000 use don't exist. For example, a call to GetSystemMetrics on my system returns 2304×864 -- two monitors each at 1152×864 -- which means that some things pop up split across the two monitors. Also, each monitor must run the same resolution, color depth, and refresh rate.

Multi-monitor support under Windows NT is a hack, but I'll take it over beta Windows 2000 or released Windows 98 any day.

Does it work well?

For everyday e-mail and newsgroups tasks, two monitors work well. I run my e-mail client on the right monitor and my browser on the left. Clicking a link in an e-mail message opens the browser without obscuring the message. I run my newsreader spread across both monitors -- the newsgroup list at the left and the message list taking up the rest of the left monitor, with the message preview pane taking up about three-quarters of the right monitor.

With development tools, it's even better because they tend to have more docking and child windows that can be moved around. For example, using Delphi 5's desktop support, I fill both monitors. On the left monitor, I have the Delphi toolbars and menu bar and a single edit window, with a docked Code Explorer. On the right monitor, I have the Object Inspector, Delphi's component palette, and the form I'm working on at the time. When I need to open a help file or the Microsoft Developer Network Library, it stays over on the right monitor, so it doesn't obscure the edit window. The debug desktop is set to replace the Object Inspector with the Watch, Local Variables, and Call Stack debug windows.

Though I hated Delphi's multiple top-level windows for a long time, they make it easy to adapt to a multi-monitor environment.

Geek chic

There are two reasons I sought out multiple-monitor support under Windows NT:

• It's easier to talk yourself into spending $300-$500 on a second or third 17-inch or 19-inch monitor than $800-$900 on a 21-inch monitor.
• A big monitor might be cool, but nothing beats a bank of three monitors.

Sometimes, size doesn't matter.