Pandash [ a Panoptical Dashboard ]

Here is how to easily setup LCD multi-monitors for your home or office.  

Have you have ever envied a hedge fund manager or stock broker with wide screens galore or security when they pan, tilt and zoom all their CCTVs on multiple screens? My little setup with three flat screen monitors makes me feel like a successful daytrader on Jolt cola. But instead of hedge funds or mall shoppers on my screen, I am in charge of watching the world while I work!  And I enjoy minding other people’s beeswax.

Right now you can pickup a 19″ flat widescreen for about $150. If not keep your eye out on TigerDirect.com, Geeks.com or my favorite NewEgg.com for deals. Your Sunday paper will have deals also. My logic is that the savings on tax negates the shipping when ordering online.  Another rule of thumb is that if I don’t save more than $20 of what I can buy locally, I don’t do online purchasing.  Invariably something needs returning and locally is always easier. 

So once you’ve got your monitors match them with a few inexpensive PCI cards at $50 a piece or use just one with a mid level AGP dual head card.  I use the midlevel gaming Radeon 7600GT video card with 2 DVI video ports that costs about $86. I use one DVI port and I use a dongle for the analog jack for the second monitor.  If you go with an older inexpensive card make sure it will drive a large LCD wide-screen. When you start to get up into the 1680 x 1050 resolution range, an inexpensive PCI card might not have the horsepower (RAM) to drive it. You don’t want to have shadows on your type or images.

My setup has an AOC 22″ widescreen and a Scepture 19″ widescreen on my main machine. Then I have a Mac laptop sans the top with a Dell monitor.  Other than video cards and drivers, it’s no problem mixing and matching monitors with hardware and OS these days.

My setup shown in the upper left video uses a Ergotron Triple-Monitor Desk Stand that costs $299 if you really want to feel important. A lost cost alternative is to build a PVC tube rack with galvanized iron brackets for less than 5 dollars. For my setup at home I built a wooden shelf over my desk and attached the monitors to that.

After setting up your hardware you can find all the software to watch multiple cams free online. I use earthcam.com for the high traffic cams like Times Square and Miami Beach. Their java applet won’t let you maximize more than one window at a time so I use 4 separate browsers. I use Firefox, IE7, Netscape, Opera and Flock all at once.

If you have video chat app like camfrog ($50) you can open up to 100 streaming windows at once. Now that’s what I call multitasking.

Good luck and feel free to contribute with questions, quibbles or comments. Thanks!