SEO rock star Danny Sullivan wrote about his monitor set up on his personal blog not too long ago. Danny recently joined the dark side and went Mac, purchasing a laptop after realizing he had the only PC laptop at a recent company meeting. He’s sold on the Mac now, but needed some MacBook Pro solutions for his multiple monitor set up in the post.
Since I don’t have a Mac, I didn’t really have any solutions for him, but it got me to thinking about my own computer and monitor arrangement and how well it works for me. And, I have to give a lot of the credit to free software. See the image below for a look at my monitors and the laptop in its stand. Danny’s got a cool three-monitor stand for his screens. I’ll get there.
Sorry for the image quality, but it’s the best my iPhone could do. 😉
Here’s quick rundown of my personal PC situation. My main work computer is an HP M9080N PC running Windows Vista. When I purchased it, I decided to max it out on hard drive space, so it’s got 1TB between the two hard drives along with a 700 GB personal media drive and a 160 GB pocket media drive.
My primary monitor includes speakers as you can see. I’m using a Tritton SEE2 USB 2.0 VGA Adapter to power a second monitor, which sits on the right of the main monitor. To the left, I have a Toshiba laptop that is provided by FramesDirect.com, who I work for as their SEO in residence. This laptop is connected to their servers by VPN for Exchange email, access to their control panels, VOIP system, etc. For a while, I had a separate wireless mouse and keyboard set up for the laptop, but as mentioned in my post Share a Mouse with Two or More PCs, using a free software tool by the name of Synergy, I am able to share the desktop PC mouse and keyboard across all three screens by way of IP addresses. It’s almost like having three monitors.