From: "Dave Ings" 

"Randall Parker"  wrote

> Well, where you can get a single monitor that doubles the horizontal
> pixels of a 21" flat panel?
>
> You can get a pair if 21" 1600x1200 flat panels for $900 total (Dell). Why
> get a bigger wider one that costs many thousands?

Two main reasons I can think of: (1) simplicity, appearance (2) the
widescreen monitor can double as a 16:9 display for watching movies. I
thought Dell had a 21 inch widescreen for around $1500? Given you can write
this off as a business expense, I wouldn't have thought the difference in
$$ was all that great (although the pixel count isn't as great as the two
Dell monitors combined you mention)

>  I'm thinking 4 gigs in a home desktop with dual cores and hard drives
> that are faster than a laptop will give me faster build times, faster
> times searching through source files, etc.

Many (most?) modern IDEs are incremental build environments, so routine
builds are instantaneous, so I wouldn't think build time would be an issue
for a typical developer's workstation. Build machines doing a full build
from scratch are a different matter, but my experience has been that full
builds are at least as I/O bound as CPU bound in which case maybe you
should be looking at SCSI to save build time.

Dave

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