I work for myself now at home and anywhere with wifi. When I made the switch, I had to make a choice. Do I want to be restricted to an office and have dual monitors? Or, do I want to learn to do everything with a laptop, a single screen and be flexible about where and when I work? It’s a difficult choice because dual monitors provide an amazing work environment. Switching to a single laptop screen seems restrictive. But, I learned.

I have an amazing 15″ Macbook Pro and I can run my business from anywhere. Last year I traveled around Europe and continued to work. Working productively and enjoyably in a Starbucks in Nuremberg was a highlight of my career.

http://blog.tinytank.net/2008/.....ounds.html

Here’s something else you might enjoy. Spatially organized desktop backgrounds:

Whenever I freelance, I keep one in my thumb drive so I can keep everything organized on whatever computer I use.

At home though, I’m switching back to one 27″ Dell since I don’t edit that much anymore. I’d rather have one larger space for my photography work, since that middle bezel wasn’t too thin. The best part is that multiple monitors forced me to change some bad habits–like keeping my email up in one window throughout the day.

However, you brought up something else interesting when you mentioned your laptop being chained down – it’s not as bad now, but it’s still a slight inconvenience, I suspect. It’s for this reason that I never suggest someone get a laptop as their primary computer unless they have very basic needs.

For people who use their computers a bit more fully, there are significant advantages to having both a powerful desktop and an inexpensive, less-powerful laptop. For a start, I find that a desktop is actually less cluttered than anything but a totally naked laptop; due to the way cords come out from a laptop in all directions, it can be very difficult to manage them. More importantly, though, having a powerful desktop gives you the performance when you need it, and your slower, cheaper laptop gives you portability at a moment’s notice. It’s not even a terribly expensive proposition, because a high-performance laptop will generally cost about the same as an equally-fast desktop PLUS a low-end laptop.

Now I can get a lot more done and the 3, 17″ monitors + stand + other items costs far FAR less than any 30″ monitor and I have way more usability. I can simply shut off one monitor when I want to show customers a design so they can focus on it and not see my book-keeping or other information.

My buddy has a quad 22″ monitor setup, but he’s a day trader and a bit crazy.

I researched and helped to implement them at work about 18 months ago. Best thing ever. What’s amazing is that so many people in the office resisted them so heavily.

I also have the laptop stand which allows you to stack papers, books etc under the laptop, which increases desk real estate. It’s similar to this one:
http://store.apple.com/us/prod.....topSellers

Strangely, when I work from home I just have a macbook, which runs various remote desktop programs and often has sessions into 4 different systems running at the same time. Expose is fabulous! But perhaps it’s time to buy a big screen for home…

I did have to smile at the “when I was in college” reminiscences. My, how times change. When I was in college, the only computer on campus took up a whole room in the basement of the science building and ate punch cards. Who would have thought that 57-almost-58 amounted to geezerhood in cyberspace?