Ric writes “I came up with a simple hack that makes a lot of sense… everyone wants more desktop space but can’t afford expensive hi res monitors… well I ran across this when tinkering with my new video cards…I placed three monitors on their side and used rotation software to make them into one workspace… 3000 pixels by 1280 pixels… view whole web pages in one view… see US letter docs at 100% in one screen… its just magic and cheap.” Link.
8 thoughts on “Simple monitor hack.. 3 monitors on their side!”
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I tried this once – but there’s some pretty big problems with it. The biggest of which is that all the rotation is done in software, not in hardware – making it verrry slow with lots of ‘weirdness’ (sheering of the screen, weird refresh rate). It’s fun and novel, I’ll grant him that, but very impractical. (Not even mentioning that it only works in Windows using the nVidia drivers.)
Rotation is supported by default in hardware in Mactinosh OS X 10.4, depending on your video card. You may need to hold down the Option key while clicking in the Display panel of System Preferences to get rotation popup menu.
This approach is absolutely wonderful for a coder. I’ve been using two 1600×1200 monitors in vertical, side-by-side for the past year or so. It’s nice being able to see well over 100 lines all at once.
I’m not sure if the translation is hardware or software on my PC, but I don’t notice any difference in performance between the two setups.
Actually, I’ve been using a setup similar to this on my ATI card, and it seems to be supported in HW now (at least on a FireGL). I needed a second monitor to go next to my apple cinema 30, and a 1600×1200 turned sideways fits just perfectly (physically & pixel wise). I still prefer the main monitor to be landscape instead of portrait just for watching movies.