Datasheet

Book VIII
Chapter 1
Finding and
Installing the
Hardware You Need
781
Upgrading the Basic Stuff
Although you probably won’t spend most of your time sweating over 25,000-
cell spreadsheets, this little comparison combined with a lot of experience
leads me to a few simple generalizations:
✦ Any modern monitor you buy can handle 1280 x 1024 resolution just
fine. If you’re staring at a screen that has 1280 x 1024 resolution, you
can see most of a page in Word or Excel. For most Windows users, that’s
good enough.
✦ If you go with a wide-screen monitor, you can put two spreadsheets on
the monitor side-by-side, or see at least half of two different pages in
Word, even at the lowest common resolution of 1440 x 900. Because of
that, wide-screens make sense for most people who use a monitor all
day long. They’re also good for watching movies, but I digress.
✦ Really big screens make an enormous difference if you have less-than-
stellar eyesight, suffer from eyestrain, or commonly work with full pages
in Word or big spreadsheets in Excel. They’re also quite handy if you
want to let other people look at what you’re doing.
You can also look into the possibility of running two monitors side by side —
doubling the amount of screen you can see at the expense of exercising some
neck muscles. Windows 7 makes setting up two monitors easy (see the next
section), and most video cards these days will play along.