I have an HP tx1000 laptop hooked up to an external 24" flat/wide display. The laptop is also a touchscreen/tablet. The screen swivels around and can lay flat. I have taken to swiveling the screen around, but leaving it open, so that my laptop has become a 2nd monitor; the keyboard is still open, but it is “behind” the new “monitor”.
Who has a similar setup? What do you do on your secondary screen? Do you find that you use the smaller screen to “work” (control the start menu and system) and the larger screen to “play” (having a sleek workspace)? Or do you use the start menu on the larger screen, and use the smaller screen as a sort of control panel?
The smaller “monitor” is touch sensitive and has a stylus. I rarely use it, because I find the mouse more controllable. But given this option, how would you also use that?
Bump… I wonder if my productivity would be hindered or helped by using the second screen. Right now I am using my widescreen as my “main” screen, and the laptop screen is sitting empty… no icons, no taskbar, no open windows, just a background.
I’m in tech support, so it’s nice to have Ultra VNC (viewing the user’s issue) running on one monitor while I research the problem on the other. The rest of the time, I usually have Outlook on one and whatever I’m working on on the other.
I don’t know that I’d have a big need for this at home. Maybe Firefox on one and a game on the other, I guess. Work tends to have me split between several things at once, but home is more focused on a single app at a time.
I use a laptop with a large display above it. I keep the taskbar and desktop icons on the laptop. I use the big screen mostly for programs that display a lot of “stuff” other than the main document - Outlook, programming IDE’s, CAD programs - and use the laptop display for browsers and windows explorer. Documents like pdfs might go on either one, but if I’m reading about something on the laptop, whatever program I’m reading about goes on the big display.