Trilateral Symmetry

I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup since before before. In fact, I can’t remember (and can’t imagine) not having two monitors in front of me. My office setup is currently two 20-inch 16:9 LCD flat panels. It’s amazing what you can artfully stuff on that sort of screen-space. I’m here to say that it ain’t uppity opulence — it’s productivity enhancement, and damn handy too. For example, with two monitors:

• You can chop-and-paste from one monitor to the other, keeping a browser open on one monitor for… uhm… err… research and your Great American Novel front and center on the other.
• You can set different resolutions on different monitors. This lets you quickly see through other eyes, a handy thing when designing web pages, especially if you have a penchant for extra-large (or extra small) fonts. Guilty, I am. I often forget that some people like their icons larger than a pinhead and text measured in multiple microns.
• You can run multiple flavors of browser — IE, Firefox, and Safari, maybe Opera just for grins — simultaneously making sure that nothing looks right on any of them regardless of what you do.
• Finally, for the A.D.D. amongst us, you can while away your day, in manifold multitasking, with more stuff in your face — calendar, email, task list, Facebook, ESPN and CNN, three or four or five or ten browser windows, slash-dot, iTunes, and a copy of the DMCA (just in case).

Running with two is easy to do. In fact, most modern, add-on video cards have two connectors, usually a DVI and a VGA (15pin DSUB) connector. Many now come with two DVI connectors. All you need do is connect up two monitors and click the check box in Windows (maybe twiddle with your BIOS), and — voila — you’ve got screen-space. Today’s LCD panels, like most hardware, are downright cheap too.

For folks that have to look at two things at once — such as when cataloging scanned documents, or working with document management systems — I recommend it. It’s almost a joy to view an item on one screen, whilst keying metadata on another. If you work with web pages, or graphics, or have to manipulate multiple things in multiple windows, it’s an amazing time-saver. It’s well worth the investment.

Wide monitors are also great, but having two monitors is even better. Better yet is having two wide monitors. Moreover, the first time you snap a window from one monitor to another in front of the uninitiated, the sudden gasp and resultant, “How did you do that?” is well worth the investment. People will think you’re cool and sexy. No need to tell them that all it takes is the dexterity to twist the screw connectors on a VGA cable — admittedly, that can be challenging.

Sadly, my home setup did not invoke gasps. It was, shall we say, embarrassing. Like the classic cobbler kids, my feet were unshod, my setup shameful. That shame came rushing home just a few weeks ago when a friend laughed out loud upon seeing the CRT monitor squatting on my desk like a 1950′s television. “Is that your monitor?” he snickered derisively. “It’s huge!”

“Huge” it seems, is no longer a desired attribute — at least when applied to monitors. That was it — I could stands no more — it was time to upgrade to something smaller.

Given the season, I decided I’d aim for a triptych — the holy grail of multiple monitors — the magic number three. Yep. Three monitors. It takes a wee bit more work than two, but offers a certain balance, a certain pleasing symmetry, if you will. I’m a great fan of symmetry. Besides, it looks really cool.

At home, my main monitor is a nice Dell 20-inch LCD panel. I got it cheap. It was staying. The other monitor — the behemoth, a huge 19-inch, 16 ton CRT — well, it had to go. So, I tucked it away, in my own personal white elephant graveyard (right next to the vintage Compaq Presario 526 and the Dell Optiplex G1 running OS2 Warp.)

To replace the CRT, I scavenged a two Dell 17-inch 4:3 monitors. They were homeless; abandoned. (It’s amazing how quickly wide-aspect monitors have become de rigueur and 4:3′s are now so much landfill.) The desktop space gained by removing the CRT was amazing — leaving more than enough space for the third LCD — with a little left over for a DVD-stack and miscellaneous other stuff.

Then I went to work on the box. To run the third monitor, I needed new hardware. I had run out of video connections. The box is a Dell Optiplex 745 — not fancy, but adequate. It’s stuffed with all the parts; packed with 4GB of RAM and about a half a terabyte of storage. Slot-wise, inside, the beast sports one PCI-e(xpress) x16 slot, one PCI-e x1 slot, and a couple of regular old PCI slots. I haven’t a clue what you do with PCI-e x1 — and it looked awful funny — so I concentrated on the other two types.

My current video card, an Nvidia GeForce 8500 GT made by BFG, is in the PCI-e x16 slot. It drives my 20-inch LCD via the DVI. Since that PCI-e slot was full, I figured I needed a regular PCI card. My plan was to keep the main monitor (center) on the GeForce 8500 and let the new card (whatever it might be) drive the outriggers (left and right). Hence, the new card needed to support at least two monitors.

Checking my own highly-organized inventory (AKA: my drawer full of stuff) I did find a couple of old video cards from long-gone manufacturers, but none worked. Totally irrelevant, I also found:

• Five old Cue Cats;
• A half-dozen old mice;
• About four thousand PC power cords;
• An OEM copy of WordPerfect Office for DOS;
• A Sharp “Wizard” PDA (circa April 1991), and;
• An “Ely Culbertson” mechanical card shuffler with the crumpled instructions for an “Ultrasonic Rodent Repeller” stuffed inside.

While briefly entertained by the cosmic juxtaposition of mice, Cue Cats, and “Rodent Repeller” instructions, it was immediately clear that none of this stuff was going to help in my quest. Consequently, as any geek would, I played briefly with the card shuffler, marveling at the mechanics, and then neatly stuffed it all back into the “parts” drawer, vowing to “clean it up later.”

I turned then to Google.

The collective Google geek consensus was: “Don’t mix video drivers.” In fact, said the Google, your second video card should be in the same chip family, or at least a kissing cousin. In English, this meant I needed a video board with an Nvidia 8xxx chipset, if not another actual 8500 GT. If I did that, both cards could and would (or should) use the same driver.

After a disappointing trip to the local Best Buy, where they never have what I want and it’s all overpriced, I tried a local computer hack-shack. No luck there, either. Next was Newegg. Even there, it seems, my options were limited unless I wanted to replace everything. I considered this, briefly admiring some quad-head (four monitors!) boards, but didn’t bite.

Eschewing the high-priced options and sacrificing instant gratification, I went cheap, crossed my metaphysical fingers, and ordered a PCI card with an Nvidia 8400 GS chip — I figured 8400 was close to 8500 …

Newegg, by the way, is terrific — excellent user interface, terrific prices, and good service. The board itself — a Sparkle GeForce 8400 GS 512MB GDDR2 PCI — was sixty bucks. True to form, and as promised, Newegg had the board here the day after Christmas.

Sneezing, I slipped it in to my PC, vacuumed out the dust bunnies, crossed my fingers, thought nice thoughts about churros, and slapped my head three times with a copy of Vista Premium Ultimate Galactic Omnipotent Edition and… it didn’t work.

Three Monitors: Diana Krall singing “A Case of You” and a glass of Syrah.

Yet, after a little tweaking, some irascible grumbling, and a couple of reboots — followed by a frantic yet fruitful hunt for a VGA cable without a bent pin — nirvana was mine.

My triptych was complete. I had trinity — three monitors — no muss, no fuss, no waiting. All that remained was to hook up all the USB hubs and try to gain some semblance of order in the cable chaos I had created. With three monitors, I discovered I had run out of power outlets and had to spring for another power strip — once again proving that no tech project ever comes in on budget.

The plethora of USB connections, by the way, was an un-expected bonus. I had forgotten that each monitor had its own USB hub, each offering four USB connections, two (totally unreachable) in the back and two on the side.

Unfortunately, DELL, in its cosmic wisdom, can’t seem to decide which side of a monitor to place the USB ports. On two of the monitors, the ports are on the left. On the other monitor, the ports are on the right (and reversed, back to front). This setup guarantees — no matter what way you turn the USB connection, when you try to stick it in the slot, you’ve got it backwards.

Three Card Monitor Monty

There is one more thing I should mention. Once done, you need to shuffle the monitors around on the “Display Properties” tab — making sure you’ve got them in the order you want. I wanted mine with the primary (20-inch LCD) monitor in the middle. Each monitor is numbered, so you just drag and drop the little image of the monitor where you want it. Easy as Three-card Monte.