If you don't use dual monitors, then this month's article may not interest you. But for those who have tried them, I will relate a recent incident that showed us just how ingrained dual monitors can become in an agency. I'll also pass along a few ideas you might find helpful.

I've observed several agencies with dual monitors and have noticed that they tend not to take advantage of the features touted as the primary reasons for investing in the second monitor. Those agencies' employees typically use their two monitors to keep open two sessions of their management systems and compare documents onscreen. Some keep Outlook (or another e-mail program) open while they do other work. However, the true benefit of dual monitors is that they enable you to drag a file from one screen and drop it onto the other. Doing so makes adding multiple attachments to an e-mail message as simple as opening Windows Explorer on one screen and the e-mail program on the other, then dragging and dropping the attachments anywhere on the e-mail message field. If you've never used your dual monitors for this purpose, try it; you're sure to become addicted within an hour. By using this feature of our agency's dual monitors, our staff has saved hundreds of hours over a two-year period, which is especially significant when you consider that staff time is an agency's largest marginal cost.

Sometimes, we realize how much we rely on something only when it is no longer available to us. Any agency that has lost the use of its management system for a day or more can appreciate the frustration of trying to perform daily operations without all the functions and efficiency the system provides. Likewise, being deprived of a second monitor can confound an employee who is accustomed to using one. Last winter, a broken pipe caused a flood in our office. Our computers were high enough off the floor to escape damage, but we had to quickly move everyone to a new space while maintaining our service capability. We initially set up the first three machines with only one monitor each, just to get by temporarily. The moment of enlightenment came when someone on our staff asked if we could really operate with only one monitor for each workstation. Such na?vet? brought us a good laugh in the middle of a bad experience and also illustrated how dependent we had become on dual monitors.

A number of readers have asked me for advice on using dual monitors with terminal services. The problem is that, while a single personal computer can support dual monitors, when that PC connects to a remote host over terminal services, access is available to only one of the monitors. Connecting with the terminal service is like opening a screen program in itself, and moving data from one screen to another in this mode would be like moving a file from one computer to another. So far, no one has found an effective solution for this problem.

An answer may be on the horizon, however, if you're willing to pay for some new screens. We all know what it's like to open multiple programs on a single monitor and toggle among them by successively minimizing open sessions. If you had enough display space, however, you could maximize two programs at once on a single screen and create the equivalent of dual monitors. The first time I heard of this concept, I was somewhat skeptical, since I'd only seen maximized programs that occupied the full-screen display. Monitors are now available, though, with enough display space to accommodate the equivalent of two smaller monitors onscreen at once. Making this trick possible is a video card (the board with a plug on it that connects your monitor to the PC's brain) that can be configured so that the monitor's resolution is high enough to allow it to display two opened programs. As a result of this configuration, dual-monitor capability becomes possible with a single monitor in a conventional environment, even in a remote terminal services connection setting.

We are currently exploring another device from a vendor called called Matrox (www.matrox.com), which sells devices that provide dual- or triple-monitor capability from a single video output. The dual-monitor device, called Dual Head2Go, can work with a laptop. If we can implement this technology, it will give us a simple, easy and inexpensive solution to the terminal-service problem. I mention it here for you to explore on your own as a possible portable computer option. Another “monitor” capability currently in the development stage is a sheet of material on which images can be displayed. It also can be rolled up like a map or chart, or laid flat and attached to a wall–a truly portable alternative to the traditional monitor. If you've been looking for a solution to problems with a terminal-services remote connection in a dual-monitor environment, perhaps one of these options will work for you.

Special Reports /

Agency Technology: How we learned how hooked we are on dual monitors

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