Since I moved house in December, I have been slowly upgrading my office and IT systems. The latest addition is the Dell Ultrasharp 2407WFP 24″ display.
The name doesn’t do it justice. It should be called the Awesome Wall-of-Screen.
It takes up most of my desk and its 1600×1200 display means that I can have email, calendar, web browser and Word open at the same time without alt-tabbing through them.
There’s evidence (see references in this from Jakob Neilsen, for example) that large monitors improve productivity. None of the research mentions how much they improve video games!
I was going to buy from Dell direct but they put the price up over Christmas so I ended up buying from Chillblast, a Bournemouth company that specialises in custom and silent PCs. It saved me about £150. As soon as Vista launches, I’m planning to order a silent workstation from them as well.
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Hi Matt
Just a quick question – do you have any specific reasons for using a PC rather than a Mac? I switched to a Mac after one too many crashes on my PC (and to be honest I was a little envious of my designer colleague’s sleek machines).
The only problem I had was finding a writing programme that wouldn’t cause problems for my clients, but I got round that by installing Word, to the scorn of aforementioned colleagues. (But what do they know anyway, all they do is colour in…)
Cheers,
Milly
But I thought you said you got distracted from writing by other applications?
I have both a PC and a Mac. However, Microsoft is one of my main clients and HP is another so it’s diplomatically correct to use a PC for my main work.
Also, a lot of the software I use for flying and games I use for recreation are only available on PC.
However, I love taking my Mac into their offices for presentations – just to wind them up with its long battery life, instant standby and general sexiness!
Touche! about the different applications. I’m trying figure out the best way to use the new screen but I’m loving having two documents or a document and a web page open at the same time. Because I work from research or interview transcripts this makes things much more efficient. Also the screen is 1200 pixels high which means I can get a lot more of the page on screen (I haven’t tried the rotated portrait mode yet but WOW! if I tried to run a distraction from word processor on that!
Matthew – I have the same monitor and it is awesome! The only problem is that I’m now addicted to screen size and want to get my hands on the next size up…when I can afford it!