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The Case For Flipping Your Monitor From Landscape to Portrait
Molly McHugh writes The vast majority of computer-related tasks see no benefit from a screen that is longer than it is tall. Sure, video playback and gaming are some key exceptions, but if you watch Netflix on your TV instead of your computer monitor and you're not into PC gaming, that long, wide display is doing nothing but hampering your experience. Let's flip it. No, seriously. Let's flip it sideways.
In general: avoid TN displays if you intend to rotate the screen. IPS displays are much better for this.
I read the internet for the articles.
Why would you want to limit yourself to only one screen? It has been repeatedly shown that the single biggest and most consistent productivity enhancing upgrade you can give to almost anyone working on a computer is a second monitor.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Subpixels orient horizontally.
" It has been repeatedly shown that the single biggest and most consistent productivity enhancing upgrade you can give to almost anyone working on a computer is a second monitor."
Nope. The biggest productivity enhancer is more resolution, because even today fucking NOBODY gets multi-monitor working right. Not nVidia, not AMD, not Microsoft, not Apple, and not Linux.
Last PROPERLY working multi-monitor setup was on SGI hardware.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Actually as I recall that's an included behavior in Windows 7 at least - drag a window to one edge of the screen and it "semi-maximizes" to fill that half. Tweakable in whatever settings screen lets you drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize. (Not using Windows at the moment, so can't test)
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
ClearType / Subpixel font rendering works just fine on my Windows 7 PC with 1 24" monitor in landscape and another 24" rotated in portrait.
It didn't work for some reason when I had a fairly old ATI/AMD graphics card (It didn't take into account the rotation of the portrait monitor), But when I replaced the card with a mid-range nVidia card the problem went away. My guess is the ATI graphics driver wasn't properly reporting the orientation and pixel layout information received from the monitor.
I have seen some (usually cheap) monitors that don't appear to have an option in their menu to set their orientation. My guess is ClearType probably wouldn't work properly on them since the DDC information would be incorrect when rotated, but that is more of a problem with the monitor than Windows.
Setting a system so that 'maximize' only expands a window to fill half of your giant wide screen
In Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, pressing Win+Left or Win+Right (or dragging a window's title bar to the left or right edge) will "Snap" it, which expands it to fill half the screen. In previous versions of Windows, you could do something similar by clicking one window's title in the taskbar, Ctrl+right-clicking another, and choosing Tile Vertically.
Scientific research has shown again and again that we can read longer lines much more efficiently than we can read short lines
Up to a point. True, 75 columns are better than 25. But the research I've read concludes that line lengths past 80 columns (roughly 36-40em) cause the reader to accidentally skip or repeat lines more often.
Many monitors have a larger bezel on the bottom. By flipping the top one it reduces non-screen space between the two.
http://www.corecommunication.ca/4-studies-which-show-that-using-a-second-monitor-can-boost-productivity/
There's 4 for you. Generally I believe it's more monitor space is what's more productive, not just having two.