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.
