Gadgetory

hey guys it's Brandon Minnemann from TechnoBuffalo and in this video we're going to talk about multiple monitor configurations we've got a lot of questions and emails from people wondering how do you connect multiple monitors to a computer why do you need multiple monitors obviously I have four behind me and there's a very good reason for that we're going to cover that in this video so for those of you that have used two monitors before know that it can really increase your productivity the ability to have two things on the screen at one time side by side such as a document and an internet site for when you're writing a report or Hulu and maybe instant messaging so that you can kind of watch a movie or watch a video while you're IME is a really great thing that can help to increase productivity I've actually seen some people with 10 or 12 monitors and there's definitely a law of diminishing return in terms of productivity so there's so there's not a five times increase from two monitors to ten monitors just doesn't work that way the reason that some people have you know eight ten twelve monitors is because they work in industries that require them to see a lot of data on the screen at one time perfect examples the finance industry stock traders they need to see many different graphs and charts and figures and items on the screen at one time to be able to do their due the profession the right way and so the question becomes how do you actually hook up multiple monitors well it's quite easy you can have as many monitors as you have video outputs so in my case I've got two video cards with two video outputs now you can fill up your desktop with as many video cards as it can handle whether it's PCI PCI Express AGP and plug in as many monitors as you can fit now of course you're going to want to have some you know a good processor enough RAM to be able to have your computer handle all of this but two monitors three monitors is not that difficult for a computer to be able to handle so what I'm going to do now is take you through exactly why I have four monitors we're going to turn the camera around and kind of show you what's on each of my four displays here so that you have an idea of how somebody with four monitors may actually make good use of that screen real estate see you in a sec okay so the two monitors on the left are both Dell 24 inch monitors with 1900 horizontal resolution and 1200 vertical resolution that was a really important resolution to me because a lot of 20 to 24 inch monitors have actually 1080 resolution now which is great for high-definition video but if you really want to be able to see a lot of things on the screen at one time to get that extra vertical resolution the 1200 really makes a big difference now as you can see on my left monitor is all about Twitter actually manage for Twitter feeds one for my personal Twitter and four for our three for various websites on the left I am using tweet deck which is an excellent program to be able to see many things about Twitter at one time so in the center I have my mentions on the right I have a group of people that I like to follow more closely than my general pool of friends over here on the left it takes up a lot of screen space which is why for the other three Twitter feeds I am using twirl which is a very narrow looking way to look at your Twitter there are buttons along the bottom you can quickly go from your mentions to your direct messages all within one very tall column so it makes it really easy to manage multiple things on the screen at one time now the monitor in the center is the one that I actually look at the most because it's right in front of me so I use it as my internet monitor and what you're going to notice here is I actually have Windows 7 running and Windows 7 doesn't have support for task bars on multiple monitors so I'm actually using a program called Ultraman it actually extends the taskbar to all of your monitors if you have multiple monitors and windows or Windows 7 it's cost $30 but I think it's tremendously worth the price because to be able to have the taskbar on multiple screens is really a great thing so I use this window 4 for internet like I said and I like to kind of keep it over here to the right so that I can see the icons that I have on my desktop at a given time I actually use a resizer program called window resize err it's a Firefox plug-in and I can quickly go about and change the actual size of the window and because this is such a high resolution screen I really have a lot of flexibility to be able to change the resolution - pretty much what most people have a lot of people have this resolution 1024 by 768 the next standard would be probably 1080 by 800 and then you get to 1080 by 1024 I also use this monitor for video editing because if it's right in front of me I want to be able to kind of take a look at it and be able to access it right from there and over here on the Left I have two del twenty inch monitors turned horizontally or actually turned vertically and the reason for that it is very specific I like having the extra vertical resolution especially in Outlook to be able to see you know 4050 emails on the screen at one time whereas if I turn them the other way I would probably see half of that now the resolution on these monitors is 1680 down and 1050 across so as I said I use this monitor a lot for Outlook email I also use it for Dreamweaver so I can take a look at website code and be able to see a lot in one take and over here on the right I kind of consider this my auxiliary monitor where I can monitor my buddy list I can play music sometimes I use it for a webpage if I'm monitoring the radar if a storms coming or something like that so that was a look at my monitor configuration again four monitors is probably overkill for a lot of people two monitors can really help a lot with productivity but it really matters what you're using your computer for for a lot of people one monitor is good enough so I hope this video was helpful and giving you some insight into how people use multiple monitors and hopefully you've an idea of whether it's for you or it's not for you so that's it for now bye bye