At work I have had 5 monitors on my desk. Let’s not argue the necessity of five monitors. It is a bit excessive. That is why I’ve been thinking about downsizing for a while. At the time the setup made sense, and I had the equipment on hand so I figured why not. Recently however my desk is been slightly cramped, and I found myself using my third computer significantly less. This set up started when I got a new 27 inch display for my laptop. It was a great needed addition since the extra real-estate is used and I blow text up a lot. With that addition I had the two 19″ monitors I was using for my Macbook Air free to move to my Mac Mini that I use. I have that machine mainly to sit on the guest wifi network to do Skype video chats with far flung staff. I can use Skype on the internal network but it never seems the same. The 15″ monitors (2 of them) I was using for the Min went towards a Dell desktop I have that I run a specific work app on. I can run it in a VM but on my older Macbook Air the VM was starved for memory. Now i may revisit the need for that machine but i like having a dedicated Windows machine around even if I dont use it often.
Since I wasn’t using the windows machine a lot I gave away the 15″ monitors and just have the Dell desktop plugged into one of the Mini’s 19″ monitors. They take DVI & VGI so I created poor mans switcher for the monitor. Longer term i will probably just RDP to that machine. Surprisingly 3 monitors is not uncommon at work. Some people even have 4 but i was a bit out there with the 5.
Now I have space on my desk that you can actually see my wedding & engagement photos. Now isn’t that whats important?