Monday, December 10, 2007

How do you organize programs on your computer?

I recently upgraded my laptop to have a third monitor attached to it. So lets count them: three monitors, including the one built into the laptop. ASCII art time!

_______ _______ _______
| | | | | |
|______| |______| |_______|

I imagine you get the picture. It's quite nice - I have a particular layout for it. I keep AIM and foobar2000 in the center monitor (foobar2000 is a music playing program, kinda like iTunes, but better in my opinion. That's another article though...). I dedicate the monitor on the right to Firefox. The left monitor varies. Sometimes it's Microsoft Word, sometimes it's Photofiltre (An image editing program I use, check it out sometime, it's closed source but it's free.), sometimes it's Visual Studio. Sometimes I switch the roles of the middle and the left monitor - it depends on what I'm working on. If it's laid back, I'll have it the way I said. If I'm working hard on something, I'll put the word document/image/visual studio in the center monitor so it's right next to Firefox (quick glance away from anything I'm referring to), and stick less avid stuff (AIM, foobar2000) to the side.

I'm the type of person who works best by spreading stuff out. Take the desk I have at home - when I'm working on stuff, I don't have neat piles, I want to be able to see everything relevant at once. When I was working on an essay last year for Advanced Biology, I had 20 articles spread out - yes - 20 stapled 8 and a half by 11 articles - so I could see the title of each and every one whenever I needed to so I could reference it. I adopted that to three monitors - I don't want to click on the taskbar to switch between everything. Yeah, I can Alt-Tab as well as the rest of them, but it's still not as convenient as shifting my glance to the right and going "Hey! That's how you do it!" or "Oh, that's what it means."

I still use a single monitor set up (my downstairs computer, school computers) and I still manage just fine, but it's just not the same. There are plenty of set ups for single monitors that work just fine for some people - virtual desktops, extensions that minimize stuff to the system tray, but I haven't had much luck getting used to them. Of course, that's just me. How do you (the reader) organize programs on your computer? Anything interesting? Tips or suggestions? I only know one other person who has more than one monitor, so most of you are working with a single monitor set up. What do you think?

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