Why My Life Ended When My Second Monitor Died
I didn’t notice the symptoms until too late. The soft, warm glow started to fade. The colors seemed a little ‘off.’ Soon it would take me two or three tries to turn it on. Before I even really knew it, my second monitor had died. I tried to revive it, even resorting to the black art of soldering. Nothing could bring back my love.
For many people, a second monitor is an unheard-of luxury. They don’t even consider having more than one; and why should they? For most people, one monitor is just fine. But not to me. In the world of the Techies, I am an oddball: I only had a second monitor, and never a third. Or more.
Why do we crave more than one monitor? More importantly, why do we need them? I’m going to give a few demonstrations in this article that I hope will explain to the non-techies just why I felt like my life ended when my second monitor left me. I had to borrow my wife’s monitor for these pictures, and the lighting in my office currently stinks, so please forgive the relatively low quality of the images.
Graphic Arts
This is the big one. I’ve done graphics for over a decade now and continue to do my own book covers. A second monitor allows me to quickly and easily compare two full-size images. It allows me to use my second monitor as a base image from which to work. In this example image, I have a picture of fall beauty on the right, and my re-creation of it in Vue Infinite on the left.
Reference Work
This can be related to Graphic Arts, as I’ll usually be using an image on one monitor as a reference point for whatever I’m working on. In this example, I’m using a map of the original 13 colonies to help me design the various land-holdings of Celestial Shadows, my steampunk series.
Multitasking
This subject doesn’t get an image because those I have include far too many personal details, but the idea goes like this: having two or three email clients open on the second monitor, having Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon up on the main one, and a chat client or two open wherever it feels like fitting. This is for days when I’m in mega-marketing mode and have to juggle all sorts of things at once. Having extra screen real-estate makes this process run much smoother and with fewer mistakes.
Gaming
There are some games, usually MMOs, where you can play more than one character at once, known as dual-boxing. I use this most notably for the Star Wars Galaxies Emulator, and I can have a character up per monitor. This allows me to role-play much easier, because I can keep track of who’s talking and doing what just by looking between monitors.
Multitask Entertainment
Last and certainly not least, there’s the gaming-while-I-watch-a-movie syndrome. A lot of games require my complete attention, or I like to concentrate on them for immersion-value, but not all games are like that. 4X games don’t require as much of my attention, so I’ll watch a movie or a TV show on the side. In this example, I’m playing Clockwork Empires by Gaslamp Games, on my main monitor, while I watch Marvel’s The Avengers.
There are other ways that multiple monitors come in handy, but these are the primary ones.
