Best Home Workstation Contest « Mr. Gary Lee
I just ran across a work from home contest sponsored by Gary Lee (www.MrGaryLee.com), while I was browsing Jane May’s blog. The contest is to see who has the best home workstation. I think I have the best home workstation, at least it’s the best and most comfortable workstation I’ve had since I started working from home over four years ago.
Here’s my entry to win the Motorola HT820 Bluetooth Stereo Headset Gary is giving away.
My Workstation
My workstation is located in a spare bedroom dedicated solely to my home office. My desk was custom built during the construction of the house. It’s an “L” shaped desk that sits in the corner of the room and has plenty of desk space, cabinets and drawers. The overhead lights are mounted to the bottom of the cabinets above my desk.
My multiple monitor configuration is the best gift I have given myself since I started working from home. As a programmer and web developer, I am constantly switching between applications. Having multiple monitors on a single computer was a huge productivity booster for me. I started out with two 17″ Samsung SyncMaster 712n monitors and recently talked my boss into giving me one of the extra Dell 17″ flat screens they had lying around the office.
I have one Windows 2000 server and two Windows XP workstations that sit under my desk. My local network is split-up into two subnets, using two routers: one network is for my work and the other is for the kids. The kids have wireless access to the Internet but cannot see my computers on the network. I’m a geek, what can I say?
Do you want to know the best thing about my workstation?
It’s the look on my wife’s face when she tries to figure out which monitor she should use to check her e-mail.
Nice setup ya got there. Good luck in the contest!!
Thanks! I don’t really expect to win but it’s fun to enter these things nontheless.
[…] but not least, have a looksie at Donovan’s (from BlogThatOutside) home workstation. The three monitor setup is pretty sweet. You know he didn’t just put that […]
Okay, I know I should just look this up online somewhere, but how do you have more than one monitor for the same computer? How does the mouse know where to be, and how does each monitor know which program you want to open? I’m as confused as your wife is! LOL!
But I do like the workstation setup. Once I figure out how to have multiple monitors, I might try it myself.
Believe it or not, it’s fairly straight forward to run multiple monitors. Dual monitors are the easiest to setup, but once you get to three or more, it can get a little tricky.
You need a dual-head video card or a video card that supports multiple monitors via a “Y” cable. I use an NVidia Quadro NVS 285. The Quadro NVS 285 supports two monitors on one DVI port, so I also needed a “Y” cable like this one.
After you install the video card and hook-up the cables to the monitors, all that’s left is installing the video card drivers and tweaking the display settings. Once you restart your computer, Windows will detect new the monitor automatically.
I will post a short article to address your other questions and to provide some resources to get you started.
Thanks! It sounds very useful. I always have at least a few programs running, and I get sidetracked with one and forget the other thing I’m doing. I often need a log open while I’m working on a project, for instance.
I look forward to learning how the mouse pointer knows where to be, and how each monitor knows which program you want on it.
I wonder if I can set up dual monitors (or more) with my laptop?
[…] from Crayon Writer had a few questions about multiple monitors in response to my entry in the Best Home Workstation contest. Here you go, Theda, I hope this […]
I just posted the dual monitor article.
I am incredibly jealous of your tri-monitors. I’m curious as to what you manage to do with three monitors that you can’t do with two though? Is the productivity boost between the two that great?
Thanks!
To be honest, the productivity boost from two to three monitors is not as significant, but the third did help some.
I am a programmer and web developer, so three monitors lets me have Visual Studio in one window, an Internet Browser to preview my web page on the second, and my SQL Query tool in the other.
Believe it or not, sometimes I wish I had a fourth monitor. Some of the projects I’ve been working on have several different components, which means that I have an instance of Visual Studio running for each of them. Using multiple monitors is so ingrained in my daily work that I would probably go crazy if I had to go back to a single.
The major pitfall I found with using three monitors is system memory consumption. Sometimes I’ll have several applications running on all three monitors which uses up all the available RAM and causes my system to slow to a crawl.
It’s easy to run out of RAM when you have so much screen space available.
[…] I’m not spending countless hours in my home office I enjoy spending time with my family and working with wood in my garage. I also play classical […]
Wow triple monitors! I have to say that I went to dual monitors last year, and I will never go back to a single monitor. My productivity has increased significantly once I got the dual monitors, because I can read from one monitor and type on the other monitor.
I like your comment about watching your wife’s face when she tries to figure out which monitor to use. That reminds me of my wife. However, recently my wife has been getting better at using dual monitors..
Ohh really Your Wife’s face?? Gud.. But onething you have a good arrangement for this
Nice setup. I never understood the need to have multiple monitors until I got an extra monitor at work… makes live much easier
Excellent… best post.