My display at work is a 1280 x 1024 flat screen, pretty basic these days, although six years ago when I got it, it was considered pretty damned spiffy. Recently, one of the contractors from our group moved on, basically leaving his nice widescreen monitor up for grabs. (It's technically against company policy, but a widely accepted practice to scavenge equipment from recently vacated cubicles. Whatever the new occupant might need will be ordered, and they'll get all new stuff anyway.)
I'm not sure of the dimensions in pixels, but physically it's the same height as mine, but "widescreen". I figured hey, I will treat myself to an upgrade. Bigger is always better, right? So last night after most people had left, I grabbed his monitor, swapped mine out, and rebooted. After messing with the resolution and a few other settings, I got things looking like they did before, but now with lots of extra screen real estate. Yay!
Except, not so yay. I know part of the whole point of Windows is that you can have various windows open at once, overlapping in various combinations. But I generally only work on one thing at a time anyway. When I'm programming, I have my SAS environment open and it's maximized. When I check my email, I switch to Outlook, which is also maximized. Whatever I'm looking at is maximized; I don't see any point in viewing less than everything I can, since it's the only thing I'm looking at.
But now everything is shifted over to the left because the display is so wide. There's no point in expanding things to screen width, because it would just make everything huge, and I'd actually have fewer visible lines on screen. Emails, Word documents, and my all-important SAS files are all way to the left. So I go through and resize all my windows to use the full height but make them all the width I'm used to, centered, leaving pillars on each side (similar to viewing SD television on an HD display).
I get that all set up, and realize that I'm now exactly where I was before. My windows are the same size as they were before; I have a nice widescreen monitor, but I'm not using any of that extra space anyway. And not only that, but I even have to go through some extra hassle to get it this way. I switched the monitors back.
What am I missing? If I did work where I need two windows open side-by-side, I could see the advantage. If I was doing graphic design or something where there's a clear advantage to viewing more pixels, I could see that. But working with text, in an environment limited to 80 columns because of historical reasons, I honestly don't see any advantage, and maybe even a few disadvantages.
Suggestions? Enlightmentment? Anyone?