While I wouldn't label myself a Luddite (seeing as I'm a software developer by trade!), I am pretty far from the cutting edge. I recently joined this century, however, by upgrading my work environment to include dual monitors, a move I've been meaning to do over the past several years but have never gotten around to it for a variety of reasons. I've heard/read of the benefits[1][2][3], and my wife's been telling me how proficient she is with her dual monitor setup at work..... I guess it's a mix of laziness and cheapness that keeps me fairly wed to the status quo. I think I'd be a good Buddhist, since my desire for material items and “stuff” is pretty much nil.
Anywho, after enough years of kicking around the idea I decided this past weekend to take the plunge and go dual monitor. We went to Frys to see about getting another video card (since mine only has a single output) and matching monitor. Sadly, they weren't selling the monitor I had purchased from the store a year or two ago (a Sharp LCD 17” LL-172C-B), but I did pick up the same video card (except a PCI one, versus the original AGP one), a cheap-o GeForce 4000 MX, about $50.
Sadly, Sharp doesn't appear to be making the same monitor I had, but I found a site where I could buy a refurbished one for about half of what a new one would cost. I'm always a bit concerned when buying used/refurbished electronic equipment, but this monitor looks and behaves brand new. Setting up the dual monitors is fairly easy (I'm using Windows 2003). The only part that wasn't straightforward was in installing the video card. Once I installed it, the BIOS thought that the PCI card was the main video output, but Windows thought the AGP card was the video output. What happened was that the monitor plugged into the AGP slot wouldn't show anything and the one in the PCI slot would show the startup screen when turning the computer on, but would go blank once Windows had loaded. The fix was to go into the BIOS editor and set the primary display channel from PCI back to AGP.
And now I have two monitors! I've just been using this setup for a couple of days. I can't say how much of a real productivity boost there is, though. It's nice to have the two monitors, don't get me wrong, but I'm just not sure if, for what I do, two is any quicker than one. The only thing that seems to be a bit quicker is debugging, since I can have VS.NET on one screen and a browser in the other, which helps with interacting with the page/stepping through lines of code in the debugger.
Pardon the gunk on the keyboard, I need to clean that off one of these days.
Right now I'm trying out UltraMon, which adds a lot of nice features for dual monitor support, such as extending the task bar, providing buttons in the Windows title bar to quickly stretch windows across screens or move it from one screen to another, and so on.
Now that I've got two monitors, I'm wondering if it's worth it to go for three...... :-)