My favorite local haunt, you know, the computer store, happened to have a deal going on with a 24-inch LCD monitor that kicks out 1920x1200 resolution, so I bought one.

It's a Sceptre X24WG. I already have a Spectre X20 that does 1650x1080, but I've been wanting a bigger monitor ever since I got a laptop that does the 1920x1200, but on a 17-inch screen. OK, so I've been wanting a bigger monitor ever since they've made them.

There's a lot to see when your resolution is huge like this, and I like to see as much as possible. The 1920x1200 is less than 300 pixels wider and just over 100 taller, but that's a lot of area in those 30,000 extra pixels.

It's attached to my KVM, so both of the desktops need to be able to kick out the right signal, and thankfully they do. The new system (OpenSolaris 11) has a newer PCI-X NVidia 9500 with 1G of DDR3 RAM, so I wasn't worried about that at all. I was more concerned about the "old system" (Ubuntu 8.10), which has an aging AGP NVidia 7600 in it; it does have 512MB of RAM, so it wasn't a big concern. It took a little tweaking to get that one to get over the tweaking I had to do to get X working on the X20, but now it seems to behave.

I was also a little worried that the monitor might push the limits of my articulated arm. No, not the one attached to my shoulder; the one on my desk that frees the space from beneath the monitor and allows me to flex the video into what makes me comfortable at the moment: hovering it over the keyboard, rotating if I'd prefer portrait to landscape (sometimes for reading), and so forth. The X20 is a heavy monitor, pushing 20lbs. The arm is rated for 25lbs or less, so I hesitated a bit. The X24, however, is a svelte 13lbs. Someone did some fantastic wizardry on the construction. It's much easier to move around now, allowing me to even loosen the joints a little bit making the arm easier to articulate.

Now I've got a plethora of LCD on my desk. There's the really old 15-inch attached to my server's thin client tucked in the corner. It's just a little smaller than the 18-inch, thanks to its very thick frame and the slightly shorter mounting. I think those two have the same resolution, so I'll probably swap the 15-inch for the 18-inch, and take the 15-inch to the server room to replace the honking CRT that's still there. The X20 will probably move to the other desk, which has a honking 21-inch CRT on it, replacing that fat monitor with this slim one, and allowing me to hook the Mac Mini (the only other PC with a DVI connector) up in a permanent "guest" workstation.

Until then, I feel like the neighbor Wilson, from Home Improvement, as I peek over the monitors to look into the other room. Not that I'm complaining.