I cannot tell you how beneficial running multiple monitors is to your personal computing experience. I am 100% sure that once you have tried using more than one monitor, you will never be able to go back. You may have noticed that I run 3 monitors on my main machine. Any ideas why? Well, being the busy geek that I am, I run Outlook on one of my monitors all the time that has my email, calendar, and tasks for the day. Since I do alot of work in the Adobe applications, and I still do some photography work, being able to have Photoshop up on one monitor and Dreamweaver/Expression Web up on another allows me to create my content and transfer it between the applications easily. The multitasking possibilites are endless! So how do you do it? Shall we Geek out?

Once you have a second monitor, you should be able to hook it up to your computer rather easily. Have a laptop? Its a pretty safebet that you have a VGA out connection on the side that you can plug the extra monitor into. If you have a modern desktop, you should have a DVI connection as well as a VGA connection on the back. If you don't have two monitor outs, then picking up a videocard will give you this capability as well as increase the performance of your PC. You can pick up a solid videocard for about $60 or so. I recommend shopping at either Amazon or Newegg.

Got the necessary hardware? Nice...that is half the battle. Seriously. Plug in both monitors and your computer should mirror them by default (show the same on both monitors). That's no fun though is it? You want to be able to use it as you wish right? Different wallpapers...use it as its own monitor...different resolution perhaps...right? Let's do it!

Right-click on your desktop and choose Display Settings.

You will now be presented with the above window. If you want to change the resolution of the monitor, simply click on the monitor you want to change (number 1 in this example). Below you will see a resolution slider that allows you to change the resolution of that monitor. If you have a recent monitor go ahead and set the Colors to Highest (32 bit). If you want to change the settings for the other monitor, simply click on monitor 2 in the image and perform the same steps. Click Apply when you are done. Click Ok to close the dialog box.

NOTE: If your monitors are not labled with numbers, then click the Identify monitors button in the top right. You can also change which monitor is your main monitor (which one has your taskbar for example) by selecting the checkboxes above the Resolution Slider.

This is nice and all, but maybe you want to have different wallpapers on each monitor. What do you do then? Well, luckily there are many people like you (and me...odd I know) who wanted the same thing. If you want a great program that is FREE that allows you to do this download Display Fusion. This program not only allows you to set different wallpapers, but it gives each monitor its own taskbar. You can also rotate wallpapers on a timer, as well as acquire some really cool ones from Flickr.

For all of you Geeks out there, there is only one choice for multimonitor management and that is Ultramon. While not free, it provides tons of functionality and I highly recommend it!