Gerben Van Dyk

I’ve used laptops for work and home for quite a while now. I’ve always liked to use a mouse rather than the touchpad or even worse that ‘thing’ between the G, H and B key. Of course it helps if you have a desk. Does anyone use a mouse with a mechanical trackball inside? Optical mice are a major leap forward.

The next thing is a keyboard. It can be a bit awkward to use an external usb keyboard without an extra screen, because the laptop screen us normally too far away. So tha tbrings us to using an extra monitor. You can get an extra monitor for reasonable prices now. I’m using the extra monitor as my main monitor when I’m in the office. The keyboard is in front and everything is placed ergonomically (as far as I’m aware). The tingling in my fingers that I had a few years ago went away after I started using a wrist pad for the keyboard and mouse.

I found that it doesn’t make a lot of difference if you use the VGA or the DVI connector, if you have one. DVI should have a better signal since it’s digital.

Once you got it all connected you can start setting it up. You have a few options here.

1. Use Windows control panel
2. Use Driver control panel
3. Use other software

To use the Window control panel: right click on the desktop and select Properties (XP) or Personalize (Vista). For Vista select Display Settings. This is how it looks like:

Display Settings on Vista

It’s pretty much self explanatory except for the bit that even Microsoft had to explain on screen: “Drag the icons to match your monitors”.

Once you identified the monitors you know which way around the monitors are. Just drag the monitors on this form to match what you have on your desk.

If you are running Vista’s Sidebar you can choose on which monitor it is by right clicking on the Sidebar and select Properties. There you can select the monitor number using the combobox labelled: “Display Sidebar on monitor:”.

The manufacturer of the graphics card in you laptop normally delivers some configuration tool. When I right click on the Desktop I see NVIDIA Control Panel. This gives me an alternative to the Windows Control Panel. It doesn’t provide more features though.

One tool I personally like is Ultramon. This tool gives you lot’s of nice extra’s like a taskbar that stretches over both monitors and show the running tasks for that monitor. Show different backgrounds and screensavers per monitor. You can buy a single licence for about $40. A free time limited trial version is available. Check it out.

Gerben

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