Liquid Crystal Goodness

I've been spending more time working from home recently, much to the delight of my cat. I've been noticing some tightness in my shoulders though, which I attributed to the awkward posture of spending an entire day hunched over a laptop. So I splurged. Wednesday, a gorgeous 20" LCD display arrived from Dell. I've been a big fan of LCD displays for a long time. I first got one back in ~98 or so, due to limits on space. I've used them at home exclusively since. This new display is huge compared to that original display, but it also managed 1600 x 1200. Me likes it. That is big enough that I can have either Eclipse or Visual Studio open at less-than-full-screen and they are still usable! The joy of it.

The new monitor also came with the definitive proof that I'm not a gamer. My old graphics card could not drive the monitor. Oddly, it could handle 1600x1200 at 70Hz, but not at 60Hz. So I popped on over to Computer Stop and picked up a new card. What was interesting was pulling out my old card. A GForce2 AGP. I think that dates from 2000 or so. It was great for an hour of Need For Speed, back in the day, but not exactly up to modern standards. Now I have a fancy new card that probably is more capable than the elderly Athlon telling it what to do with itself.

Word of warning: I also picked up a Belkin "Compact KVM" so that I could use a USB keyboard/mouse combo and be able to plug either my Dell D610 or my 12" PowerBook in to that luscious monitor. Not recommended. It occasionally gets freaked out by something and decides to not to allow me to switch to my laptop. Apparently it overrides your manual override when it doesn't think there is a device there. grrr. 30 minutes with their tech support just proved that the device is crap.