Not long ago, my lovely external monitor gave out completely. I suppose I could complain about how nothing lasts well these days, but it lasted a lot longer than the Gateway computer it originally came with, which self-destructed after 19 months of an 18-month warranty.*
One does not need an external monitor, and I was prepared to do without for a while, but Porter, God bless him, cares for his wife's desires as well as her needs...and an external monitor is especially nice when the regular one is a small laptop screen. So we ventured out shopping.
And blundered into a CompUSA monitor sale.
At first I was very disappointed, because my old monitor was essentially square, and every single new one was rectangular, with more width than height. I've always found height more important, as it reduces scrolling—and square even better. But apparently the rest of the world does not agree with me.
We decided on a ViewSonic VX2250 22" widescreen LED monitor. (The link takes you to Amazon, but we actually bought it from CompUSA.) And I've decided it's cool.
Really cool; that was a selling point. My office gets hot from all the computing equipment, and it's lovely not having the monitor pour out detectible heat. So we're saving energy at two levels: the monitor and the air conditioner.
And, in the spirit of New Year's Resolution #4 (Like More Things), it turns out that I love the widescreen format! Much credit goes to Porter, who pointed out that I now can have, in effect, three screens, by dividing the new monitor into two, side-by-side windows. It's not a perfect system, because the resulting windows are a bit smaller than I like, but I can easily switch between that and full-screen mode as needed. It's really helpful not to have to keep flipping back and forth among screens.
I understand that the main reason for the popularity of this screen shape is for watching movies. The ability to watch movies does not even make the list of what I look for in a computer monitor, but it's true that if I'm watching something by myself, there's no point in turning on the television—this screen does very nicely, thanks.
I'm so glad that my husband doesn't read this or he would be begging for your left over parts! He loves to tinker with such things and would probably decide that he needed just one more computer for his collection. :)
I'm glad you like the monitor. We recently upgraded my husband's monitor to a widescreen, and he loves it for the same reason you do!
I was looking into an external monitor a while back and really like the widescreens one could rotate from landscape to portrait orientation. My laptop's a widescreen (8:5 ratio) and while it's neat for movies (rare use) and great for our microscopy software (even rarer on my private laptop), the only thing that makes scrolling bearable is the high resolution (1680x1050), which if you don't mind really small type is great for displaying a lot. But a large portrait oriented screen...
I ended up giving up on that just because what we have works.
Margaret, don't you think you need a Florida vacation? Come by car and I'll be happy to stow some computer parts in it when you're not looking. :) (And thanks for commenting! You're welcome anytime.}
Stephan, the rotatable monitor is exactly what Porter was looking for but the salesmen we talked to had never heard of!
Does that shape make Word documents appear the wrong shape when you're typing, or am I still last-century to even be using Word? My new monitor at school makes my documents skewed??
lcs
Well, I still use Word. :) Then again, I've been accused of being last millennium. I don't have any problems with the shape, though, no matter how I size the window. At full screen it automatically shows me two pages instead of just one in my normal, 100% "print layout" view. (I'm using Word 2007.) Do you notice the problem with anything besides Word? If so, it sounds like a problem with a monitor setting. If not, I'm clueless.
UPDATE: I have to mention that I'm completely sold on the wider monitor. I just had to get over the idea that it was for movies. It turns out that many programs now benefit from the wider format. Spreadsheets, for example.
