Create a kick ass development and reading environment

Almost since a two years now. I have the luxury of having three monitors available to me at work. Being a graphics developer it was essential to have large and beautiful screens and screen space that I could use effectively.


At work I primarily develop web based applications.
This means I often have an application to run, a development environment and a browser or mail client running simultaneously.

I also sometimes was to debug an application or remote into production and watch server logs without interrupting my current development work flow.

I even watched the E3 press conference while developing at work.

I have often struggled to create a similar environment at home due to the following reasons.

• High cost involved in buying a monitor that Rotates to either portrait or landscape mode.
• These "pivot monitors" usually run at around 250$ for 20 inch.
  
• Not enough table space to keep my laptop and tow other monitors on the same desk

After my recent dissection of my Dell e1505, I decided to fix this problem at home. I initially wanted to buy another monitor to partner my existing one. I have an Acer2016W LCD monitor that works fine. After researching a bit I couldn't find any monitor that would pivot for <265$,>

I decided then that I need to use my current monitor and find a way to match it with either an available LCD mount or a compatible spare.


I found one at dell.com that was adequately priced just 45$, I applied a couple of coupons from dell and got another 10$ off. You can find the mount here


I could find similarly priced options at ebay as well.


After ripping the base off my old monitor, it wasnt as straigt forward as i thought, I mounted the NeoFlex mount onto the screen.

Remaining steps involved reconfiguring my desk space and ordering a KVM switch.
I now have two laptops and three desktops all in my room (yea one windows vista, one ubuntu and a power mac G4). I will write about my room in another blog article.


Finally after downloading older ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 Catalyst driver for my Dell e1505, I got the screen rotation or pivot to work.

An now behold I have visual studio configured exactly as per spec my requirements.





There are several advantages of having portrait mode screen.

• I can now see roughly 90 lines of code apart from a solution explorer contains 3 project fully expanded in visual studio
• Reading PDF files beacomes easy as it feels like a page.
• Browsing forums and reading blogs becomes much easier as i can quickly scan most of the page without having to scroll up and down multiple times.
  

Total Cost of the project 45$. Total satisfaction : priceless