My a bit overzealous setup (Pics warning!)
Posted: Sun Jul 27, 2008 10:39 pm
Here is my current setup (with two borrowed Samsung 20.1" monitors):
Sorry for the crappy picture. The lens on my camera is not wide enough and because of a wall I couldn't go farther away from the desk to better compose the picture. Because of the angle of the picture monitors look crooked but in reality the are perfectly aligned.
Gear (from left to right):
* Advanced dock (not really visible but its in there, trust me) with a NVIDIA video card running the two external 20.1" monitors.
* T61p WUXGA, Windows XP Pro
* Samsung 204B, 20.1" UXGA running off the NVIDIA video card in the advanced dock through a DVI cable.
* Samsung 244T, 24" WUXGA running off the DVI port of the advanced dock. It is being used as the primary display device.
* Samsung 204B, 20.1" UXGA running off the NVIDIA video card in the advanced dock through a DVI cable.
* X61s in X6 ultrabase with Mint 5.0 Linux.
* Lenovo model SK-8845 (FRU # 41A5161) keyboard (highly unrecommended).
* A set of Monsoon flat panel speakers behind the 20.1" monitors. The subwoofer is sitting on the floor behind the advanced dock to the left of the picture. These speakers are at least 6 years old and they still rock as the day they were bought.
* Misc nicknacks that always find their way to work desks.
Setting up the two video cards to run three external monitors took a couple of hours to configure. I kept getting BSOD from one or another video driver even though both video cards are NVIDIA with NVIDIA's own drivers. I still haven't resolved the issue with the internal wireless card on the T61p which doesn't get initialized correctly - hence the Netgear PCMCIA card sticking out of the T61p. This setup provides 7040x1200 ((1920+1600+1920+1600) x 1200) of continuous desktop. I can seamlessly drag and drop windows to any of the 4 displays. From where and how I sit, I do have about 2.5-3 inches of blind spot on right hand side 20.1" monitor because of the X61s screen covering that area but its something I can live with instead of having the laptop slip off the desk. I already have to use a small cardboard box to balance the advanced dock and the T61p from falling off to the lower level of the desk.
I am using UltraMon application to correctly display windows on each monitor otherwise Windows XP doesn't extend the taskbar to other monitors and all windows clog up the taskbar on the main display.
Here is what a full screen shot looks like (actual screen shot, NOT concatenation of 4 separate images):
By looking at the taskbar area we can see where one monitor's dimensions end and the next one's begin.
Some thoughts:
Now having scratched the itch, I think the two extra external monitors don't really really increase productivity. One can quite easily accomplish everything with the internal LCD and a single external monitor. I don't play computer games so I cannot comment on what that experience might be like on this setup. Watching a video also has to be confined to a single monitor in full screen mode otherwise the proportions get all screwed up. On the brighter side, zoomed out all the way, Google Maps displays the whole world thirteen times repeated in a single browser window spanning all 4 displays - pretty surreal.
T61p handles scores of opened windows (including lots of browser windows) like a champ without bogging down at all. I did have the laptop lockup a couple of times requiring a hard reset though which I suspect is because of the video drivers.
Room does get noticeably warm because of the displays.
Regardless of the bones I have to pick with MS Windows, I can undock the T61p (which requires a complete shutdown) and have it come up without a hitch with all the rest of the external monitors not hanging off of it. For using Linux, I would have to have two different versions of the xorg.conf file, one for the undocked profile and a painstakingly manually edited second version for the docked profile and finally a method to somehow chose them at the boot time before the X starts - which is all doable but not exactly for the faint of the heart.
Sorry for the crappy picture. The lens on my camera is not wide enough and because of a wall I couldn't go farther away from the desk to better compose the picture. Because of the angle of the picture monitors look crooked but in reality the are perfectly aligned.
Gear (from left to right):
* Advanced dock (not really visible but its in there, trust me) with a NVIDIA video card running the two external 20.1" monitors.
* T61p WUXGA, Windows XP Pro
* Samsung 204B, 20.1" UXGA running off the NVIDIA video card in the advanced dock through a DVI cable.
* Samsung 244T, 24" WUXGA running off the DVI port of the advanced dock. It is being used as the primary display device.
* Samsung 204B, 20.1" UXGA running off the NVIDIA video card in the advanced dock through a DVI cable.
* X61s in X6 ultrabase with Mint 5.0 Linux.
* Lenovo model SK-8845 (FRU # 41A5161) keyboard (highly unrecommended).
* A set of Monsoon flat panel speakers behind the 20.1" monitors. The subwoofer is sitting on the floor behind the advanced dock to the left of the picture. These speakers are at least 6 years old and they still rock as the day they were bought.
* Misc nicknacks that always find their way to work desks.
Setting up the two video cards to run three external monitors took a couple of hours to configure. I kept getting BSOD from one or another video driver even though both video cards are NVIDIA with NVIDIA's own drivers. I still haven't resolved the issue with the internal wireless card on the T61p which doesn't get initialized correctly - hence the Netgear PCMCIA card sticking out of the T61p. This setup provides 7040x1200 ((1920+1600+1920+1600) x 1200) of continuous desktop. I can seamlessly drag and drop windows to any of the 4 displays. From where and how I sit, I do have about 2.5-3 inches of blind spot on right hand side 20.1" monitor because of the X61s screen covering that area but its something I can live with instead of having the laptop slip off the desk. I already have to use a small cardboard box to balance the advanced dock and the T61p from falling off to the lower level of the desk.
I am using UltraMon application to correctly display windows on each monitor otherwise Windows XP doesn't extend the taskbar to other monitors and all windows clog up the taskbar on the main display.
Here is what a full screen shot looks like (actual screen shot, NOT concatenation of 4 separate images):
By looking at the taskbar area we can see where one monitor's dimensions end and the next one's begin.
Some thoughts:
Now having scratched the itch, I think the two extra external monitors don't really really increase productivity. One can quite easily accomplish everything with the internal LCD and a single external monitor. I don't play computer games so I cannot comment on what that experience might be like on this setup. Watching a video also has to be confined to a single monitor in full screen mode otherwise the proportions get all screwed up. On the brighter side, zoomed out all the way, Google Maps displays the whole world thirteen times repeated in a single browser window spanning all 4 displays - pretty surreal.
T61p handles scores of opened windows (including lots of browser windows) like a champ without bogging down at all. I did have the laptop lockup a couple of times requiring a hard reset though which I suspect is because of the video drivers.
Room does get noticeably warm because of the displays.
Regardless of the bones I have to pick with MS Windows, I can undock the T61p (which requires a complete shutdown) and have it come up without a hitch with all the rest of the external monitors not hanging off of it. For using Linux, I would have to have two different versions of the xorg.conf file, one for the undocked profile and a painstakingly manually edited second version for the docked profile and finally a method to somehow chose them at the boot time before the X starts - which is all doable but not exactly for the faint of the heart.
