With the onset of summer heat, what could be cooler than to replace my last CRT monitor with a new energy-saving LCD monitor?  Especially if it has twice the screen area despite taking up less space on my desk.

So after a LiveJournal friend assured me that City of Heroes runs great on widescreen monitors, and knowing that Sims 2 does the same, I went to my favorite electronics shop. They had a HPw2228 at a rather affordable price (by Norwegian standards), certainly much less than I used to pay for smaller monitors in the past.  And I have very good experiences with HP products in general.

Despite my reference to summer heat, it was actually raining today. No great loss, since it did not rain hard and I would have been drenched in sweat even if I was not drenched in rain.  The monitor is not THAT heavy, at least compared to the old CRT, but when you carry them for some minutes it starts becoming quite good exercise.  So much more since my arms are less exercised than most of my body.

I came home unharmed and switched the monitors. I did not even turn off the computer or log out, although I did save stuff.  That was probably a wise decision, since iexplore.exe died on the spot, taking with it the startup menu and the task bar.  Luckily I could still log off in a dignified manner using ctrl-alt-del and choosing the appropriate menu choice, in this case restart.  The machine recognized the monitor without me running the CD that came with it.  Well, perhaps not perfectly.  I have had one more iexplore crash since, and several Sims 2 crashes.  I may eventually install the driver, perhaps. Actually I don’t plan to use this machine much for Sims 2, but I do it now because I wanted to look at it.  It is awesome. These things are seriously habit-forming.

They are also known to increase productivity more than an increase in processor speed or hard disk space, according to a study a decade or two ago.  Being able to see more stuff on the screen at the same time is quite useful, sight being by far our most information-dense sense. It certainly helps when playing City of Heroes, but the study was about office work. Having reference works open while you write seems another obvious use.

Hopefully this will be enough justification for now. It is midnight again!