How much does an external monitor help?

dodos

So I'm in college and use a Macbook Pro. The 15 inch screen is nice, but I sit ~3-4 feet away from my laptop (sometimes 5 when I recline) and find it hard to read some text on the screen. Is it worth the money to buy a 19" external monitor? As far as monitors go, the one I'm looking at isn't too expensive (roughly $125), but I did spend a lot of money last week on both LittleBigPlanet and Fallout 3 and I'm weeping inside.

Would an extra monitor that's only 4" in increased size help me out? Also, I spend a lot of the time at my laptop being a CompSci major.

Fraz

Not only will the size help, but having an extra screen is also very helpful.

I'm not a programmer, but I imagine you have to work on code while reading documentation. I'm sure it will help.

DeathPrawn

As a CS major, you'll find it a lot easier to use an external monitor, if only for the added real estate of having two displays. You can have code open in one window and documentation in another. You can compare two pieces of code side by side. If you do web design work, you can have a page's code open in one window and a web browser in the other viewing the page. If you do a lot of cross-platform coding, you can use VM software to have OS X running on one screen and Windows or another Unix system (Linux, etc) on the other.

vonPoonBurGer

My main work system is a laptop with a 15" screen. A few months back the IT guys gave me an external 19" flat panel as well. At first I thought I wouldn't have any use for it, but now I find it invaluable. I can do stuff like have RDP or SQL windows in full screen on one monitor with email or websites open in the other. When coworkers come by my desk to see a problem I'm working on, I move my session windows to the 19" monitor so it's easier for them to see. The improvement in legibility on the second monitor is dramatic. It's not just the physical size, a quality external flat panel will likely have a much better contrast ratio than a laptop's internal display, and that helps a lot with ease of reading.

Edit: one thing I should mention. My laptop's internal 15" display has a native resolution of 1680x1050, but the external 19" flat panel has a native resolution of 1280x1024. So while the external monitor is much larger physically, it feels smaller from a usage perspective since it actually has ~25% fewer pixels. If I had been picking the external monitor myself instead of getting whatever IT wanted to give me, I probably would have chosen a 21" widescreen flat panel with the same native resolution as my laptop's internal display.

dodos

My laptops native resolution is 1440x990. The monitor I'm looking at will have 1680x1050 through DVI. I'm about ready to buy it, but that click at checkout is...just...so...hard. You said the legibility has increased? I'm really looking to improve my posture by being able to read on the bigger screen and thus lean back instead of forward.