Terry

I'm about to switch jobs which will have me using a laptop and second monitor attached to that. I'm thinking of a 24" with 1920x1200 res as the secondary. Plenty of room for eclipse and code, while the smaller laptop screen 15.4" will be for the browser.

For music, IMs, etc. I'm debating using an older, second computer. This computer could also have IE 6 still running for additional testing.

"The more video you're putting out, the more your computer is working, so having a video card with an accelerator will take some of the load off your CPU"

I don't think this is the case if he's runnning XP.

Then I added a third and noticed an increase, but not nearly as much from going one to two.

The the height of it, my three were: 1 17 inch laptop screen 2 Dell 20 inch Flat Screens

Unfortunately, I believe that my current desk doesn't allow for proper ergonomic use of multiple monitors. I kept jerking my head back and forth and eventually developed a constant dull pain in my jaw.

I've been experimenting with different setups to see if that constant dull pain in the right side of my right jaw will go away. I think it's slowly dissipating.

Right now I'm back to a single monitor. With a few exceptions, I really don't miss the dual monitor setup.

My architect suitemate has a 30" 2560x1600 Apple Cinema monitor. These are down to $2k and could be in my future if I have a good year.

When I added a 2nd monitor I found a massive improvement in productivity. When I added the third monitor I saw only a slight improvement. But,... you would have to pry the third monitor out of my cold dead hands, if you wanted to take it away.

I sometimes wish I had a 4th monitor, but I know that it would probably not help my productivity.

I find it handy to put my eclipse (or dreamweaver) palates on a one of my side monitors and devote the main (middle) monitor to 1600x1200 of just code.

I will 2nd Michael's recommendation of UltraMon. It is a must for multi monitor.

I have a laptop (15.4" widescreen) with an external 19" monitor set to the right and slightly higher. At home I used a 19" monitor in portrait mode, again off to the right and slightly higher.

I keep IM and other distractions on the external monitor and I work on the laptop.

I started out a desktop with monitor, than upgraded to two 19" LCD. Two monitors improved my productivity dramatically. I later upgraded to a monitor with a 24" 2405fpw connected, I really like the resolution of 1920x1200. I think the ideal setup would be a 30" 2560x1600 or higher resolution monitor.

I find 1280x1024 to be reasonably crippling, and 1024x768 to be unusable! I don't maximise windows when I work (with two exceptions that I'll mention in a minute) because I find that maximising windows is a waste of real estate (at the resolution I use).

Primary Monitor (Sony 19" CRT @ 1600x1200 - starting to get a bit blurry):

I generaly (manually) cascade my non-maximised windows from the bottom left of screen to the top right, so that the top left corner of the window is easily clickable even though I might have a dozen or more windows open. At any one time I could have these things running, it a mostly left-to-right'ish order: Windows Explorer (times a few), Command Prompt, SQL Management Studio, Email(s), Notepad, Acrobat Reader, Firefox + FireBug, Eclipse (or occassionally Dreamweaver 8). I might also have Outlook and Photoshop CS open, but I always run them maximised (the first exception) and just minimise them while not directly using them.

When I'm coding I have Eclipse (or Dreamweaver) taking up the full height of the screen positioned at the very top right, but only using about 55-60% it's width (using 1600x1200 that's a good 900+ pixels wide, more than enough for even long lines of code). This allows me to look at column names and tables on the left of screen in SQL Management Studio or other things from emails or notepad windows, while I code on the right with minimal window switching.

Seondary Monitor (15" CRT @ 1024x768 - if this was my primary monitor I would die!):

This is usually where my browsers go, and unfortunately I just run them maximised (the other exception) because the monitor doesn't even handle 1280x1024 or beyond. I would have a similar cascading setup if this were a larger monitor (preferrably also running at least 1600x1200) where I could also more easily run a decent height Firefox + FireBug window, Virtual PC and Terminal Services @ 1280x1024, depending on the work I'm doing at the time. For now I use these on the primary monitor only - the main killer is running IE6 in a virtual machine on my primary monitor because it overlaps my code window, and I can't move it to the secondary monitor because the resolution is too low - 1024x768 doesn't fit inside 1024x760 when you have a window around the VM and the host OS' taskbar taking up room too!!!).

I think if I was forced to use 1280x1024 I would NEED 3 monitors. I would be much happier using just 2 monitors @ 1600x1200 or 1680x1050 though :)

I'd be interested to see how others work!

I really like the widescreen format for my IDE, and the other one would be nice to be able to swivel to a page reading format for long documents, query outputs, etc. I could see a 3rd monitor possibly being useful if you rely heavily on IM or email.

I've seen one setup online that uses the Dell 30" as the centerpiece with two 20" monitors in portrait as the "wings" - the 30" is as tall as the 20"ers are wide. That would seem ideal, using the native maximization on the 20" monitors for documents, and the massive center monitor for your IDE, with verticaly split panes.