How many displays could you use effectively

[TheGreySpectre]

Thread title pretty much says it all. How many displays do you think you could use effectively at home? How many could you use for work?

At home I can use 3. I tried hooking up a 4th and it got very little use.

At work I wish I had 6. I generally have about 6 different code files open and a couple documents that I wish I could look at all at the same time.


edit: I mean for individual windows. I mean I suppose you could span a game across 24 monitors if you had the gpu power, but then it is really acting like one huge monitor.

 

[Ehren8879]

For personal stuff I can get away with two with little loss of productivity, but when working I need a minimum of four screens so that I'm not flipping through windows constantly.

 

[Dan_D]

I use 3 for everything. I work from home so I use the same setup for both work and personal stuff. I could get away with using only two and was very happy with them but that sucked for gaming. With three, the third monitor doesn't get fully utilized for anything but gaming.

 

[450]

1-2.

At my apartment I have 1920x1200 and 1440x900, works well enough for me.

 

[DisrupTer911]

at home. comfortably 2.
i'd love 3 tho just to have one to have videos playing on.

at work...i run 2.

 

[Dan_D]

at home. comfortably 2.
i'd love 3 tho just to have one to have videos playing on.

at work...i run 2.

I do that quite frequently. I'll work on two and use the third monitor for movies or TV shows I've got on my HTPC.

 

[ZoNe]

I use 2. One 20" in portrait for web and stuff to minimize scrolling and 24" wide which I can fit two apps on fine usually with windows 7 splitting it does. I would prefer a 30 to do this due no 30's are any good.

 

[LeninGHOLA]

I use 2, but could easily put to use a third.

 

[Ducman69]

At work I had three, just because I was too lazy to flip through windows to monitor customer SLAs, so have a dedicated one for that.

At home I had three, found the third display not very useful, but I am annoyed by lack of symmetry, and while two is symmetrical, watching a movie or gaming on it is not. Indeed, it induces perturbation... *blows bubbles from pipe*

So one large center portrait and two smaller side landscape is the way to go IMO.

In general, a single large high resolution display in Windows 7 is better than two smaller ones of equal area, but generally more monitors means more area and more resolution.

 

[Oldie]

I hooked up 5 once for giggles and the outside two never really got much action. Three seems to be my sweet spot, and I utilize all of them all day quite a bit. I've been traveling and stuck on a laptop for the last week or two and it BLOWS.