mattbell

I was at Fry's the other day, and I was amazed at how cheap big monitors have become. They had some 28-inch monstrosity for $400. A 24-inch monitor was a little over $250.

If you don't have a lot of space on your computer screen (either at home or at work), you should get more. The jump in productivity you get from having 2-3 full sized windows open side by side is huge. It more than repays the cost of the monitor within a few weeks or even a few days.

While I was traveling I had a 9-inch screen on my little eee pc travel laptop. I can say that tasks like putting together a blog post with pictures can be done like four times faster now that I'm back in front of a couple of larger screens.

If your computer supports it, you can get two screens instead of one, and use the second screen as a "side" screen. You can leave open email or some other thing you frequently switch to on the side screen.