It’s official. I finally broke down and bought an LCD monitor for my laptop. I have hymned and hawed for a few years about getting one 19″ monitor or dual 15, 17 or 19″ monitors.

Last night I purchased a Samsung 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor. Wow is all I have to say. That and I’m glad I held out this long on buying a new monitor. I picked up a 15″ Samsung LCD rather “cheap” (at the time) a few years ago but was never overly happy with the quality of it. My girlfriend has been using the 15″ since her iBook bit the dust and she bought a Mac Mini with money she didn’t have so I was a nice guy and lent her my only monitor and remoted into my desktops instead from my laptop.

I have this puppy hooked up to my laptop and was glad to have found and using the “expand to this screen” feature. I can do testing on the 15″ LCD laptop and have all my development going on the 22″. So nice to not have to be scrolling so much although websites look funny in it maximized. It’s like having two computers! I can drag a window onto either screen and maximize it which I was assuming would maximize across both screens but it only does the one. Another benefit of this is that I get less distracted from IM since it’s only on the laptop which I have to turn my head to the side to look at. It’s also great being able to set differing resolutions on either LCD.

It’s rather light in weight considering my girlfriend was carrying it with one hand out to the car. I love how easily I can move it up and down, swivel it side to side, and rotate it backwards/forwards. I have never had such little resistance and ease in adjusting a monitors position before.

I’ve now been contemplating moving my Xbox 360 from my 25″ monochrome TV to this 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor. Whilst the girlfriend goes to a sex toy party next weekend, the boys may come over to play Xbox. Only now I can hook up the Xbox to the TV and the Xbox 360 to the LCD. Of course doing so means I’ll have to undo what I did last weekend of moving my cable modem and wireless router from one side of the room to the other so I can plugin my Xbox Live.

It’s a rough life being a geek