OFSTED and expensive kipple

[ffutures]

My 17" monitor began to die a few weeks ago - there's something wrong with the backlight and it's taking four or five minutes to get up to brightness, and even then is a bit on the dim side.

It's out of warranty, so I decided that when I next had cause to celebrate something I'd buy a new one, and make it a biggie.

As it happens the cause came today - my school had its OFSTED inspection and they rated us as "outstanding," which is about as good as it gets.

So after work I went shopping; what I would have ideally liked is a 22" or 25" conventional format monitor, but they don't seem to make them at affordable prices, so I ended up with a 22" widescreen Hyundai, 1680 x 1050 resolution - it's good enough for my purposes, cost considerably less than the 17", and has a 3 year warranty. I'm now trying to figure out what I'm going to do with the extra width - I don't particularly want to watch movies on this PC when the other one is connected to the 40" screen, and for word processing etc. the increased width ratio isn't particularly useful. The extra screen size helps considerably though, it's about the same height as a 20" conventional format so text is considerably easier to read. I suppose that I'll end up moving toolbars etc. to one of the sides, on software that supports it. Anyone got any experience of this?

Comments

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I've got the Apple 23" Cinema Display, which is widescreen. It's actually useful for word processing, because I can see two pages side-by-side (or one page for word processing, and the other open to my reference work).

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Two side by side windows is probably the most logical use for my purposes, e.g. have the PDF of the game open in one window when I'm editing the word file in the other - I've been switching from one to the other which is always a bit of a pain.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Once I could do this I stopped printing as many things. Previously, the flipping back-and-forth was so frustrating that I'd often print a document so I could have it open at teh same time I was editing another.

[draconin.livejournal.com]

I was about to comment on exactly the same thing! It makes it WAY easier to work on Word documents when you are able to see two pages side by side.

Actually, it's far more than this. Having the wide screen lets you have two programs open side by side while letting each have enough real estate. It means that where you would normally have to Alt-Tab between the two, you can just have both up at the same time. Very convenient.

Isn't the march of technology wonderful? I remember when a 15" mono CRT was five or six hundred dollars!!