原创 Three screens, keyboards, and mice - but one minor niggle

I've long referred to my office as "the pleasure dome" in jest – but recent changes really have made it a pleasure to go to work.

A few months ago I decided to invest in a large computer monitor on the basis that (a) I spend all day every day slogging away on my computer and (b) my eyes aren't what they used to be. I looked around and found a 28-inch beauty for a very reasonable price, and I was absolutely delighted with it when it arrived (if this was Lord of the Rings I would refer to it as "My Precious").

In fact, I was so delighted that I decided to invest in two more. I know, I know, this was really rather extravagant of me, but I decided that I needed to give myself a treat (and who deserves one more than me?)

This was around the time that my notepad computer crashed due to a virus, almost causing me to lose all of my working data. In order to address this, I purchased a refurbished multicore Xeon processor based tower for use in the office. This Tower came equipped with a rather ferocious graphics card capable of driving two monitors, and I picked up an additional refurbished graphics card from eBay for only $35 (this was a GREAT deal because the retail price for a new card was $500+ ... Eeek!).

This also prompted me to start using Dropbox to synchronize my working data across my Tower and notebook computer along with Google Business Apps to synchronize my email. But the really cool thing, of course, is the fact that the three 28-inch monitors give me a humongous desktop. Apart from anything else, this has the added bonus of making me the envy of all the other guys in the building (yes, I know, people will tell you that it's not the size of your desktop, it's what you do with it, but trust me on this one ... in this case bigger really is better [grin]).

Using this setup, I typically keep my email up on the left-hand screen; one or two Word documents I'm working on in the middle screen; and any graphics (Viso, Paint.net, etc.) applications up on the right-hand screen.

When I first got the three monitors I was working on a standard rectangular wooden desk, but this really wasn't conducive to swapping back and forth between screens. Happily, I spotted a nice, unused curved desk in the corner of one of the other rooms in the building in which I have my office, and I managed to make a trade with its owner.

As you'll see from the picture above, in addition to the three screens, I also invested in three keyboards and three mice (thank goodness for USB is all I can say). This really makes it easy for me to spin from one display to another. Of course all of this might seem like overkill, but if it saves me as little as 15 minutes a day over the course of the next 10 years than it will be worth its weight in gold – plus it's really cool (and you can't put a price on "cool" [grin]).

There is just one small fly in the soup. The way things are at the moment, all three mice control the same cursor. This means that if I'm working with the left-hand mouse-screen combo and I spin round to the right-hand mouse-screen combo, I have to use the right-hand mouse to drag the cursor all the way from the left-hand screen across the middle screen to the right-hand screen ... and so forth.

I know, I know ... this is a minor niggle in the scheme of things and it really doesn't behoove me to moan and groan ... but "still an' all" as they say, it would be great if each mouse could have its own cursor. This way I could arrange things so the left-hand mouse had its cursor on the left-hand screen; the middle mouse on the middle screen, and so on.

At the moment I don't think this is possible, but I am open to suggestions...