split screen monitor

When dell says its 20" monitor, for example, has a page by page feature, does that mean you can have one program on the left half of the screen and one program, or document, or the desktop on the right half of the screen? Is this even possible? Is there software that would allow you to do this?

 

not sure what a page by page feature is, but what you are describing is called dual desktops and can be achieved buy installing two video cards, 1 apg and 1 pci and hooking up a monitor to each card, OR by installing a card with dual outputs and hooking up a monitor to each output. it is possible, common even, and windows has this feature built-in as long as you install the video card(s) correctly.

 

I think you're referring to their 20" FPW (W for widescreen) monitor?

if so, then yes, at high resolutions you can fit two 'normal' sized windows next to eachother (browser windows, word documents etc...)

 

I have the 2005fpw, and, personally, I find that the picture by picture feature is pretty useless. Basically, what it does is it puts two different inputs on the screen at the same time. The monitor has DVI, VGA, Composite, and S-Video inputs. For example, you can have your computer on one side of the screen, and your Xbox plugged into the S-Video on the other side. The downside is that since it is wide screen, it puts large black spaces on the top and bottom. It leaves a small amount of space on the screen for both images. Your desktop becomes unusable since it's so small. Now, it might be more useful if you were putting your TV next to your video system or something similar. But, if it were me, I wouldn't make it a necessity when buying the monitor.

On the other hand, I absolutely love the monitor for what it does...... be a computer monitor. Games that support widescreen like Counter-Strike and UT2004 look awesome. The amount of desktop space is great. And the color and brightness are amazing. And the sub $400 price makes it, IMO, the best monitor on the market.

 

Thanks for the responses. What I am trying to achieve may be unfeasable. It would be useful for me to have a monitor that could put one program on the left of the screen and one on the right. Some programs do not allow control of the window size; it would be nice to designate such a program to one side of the screen while using the other side for ms word, webbrowsing, or whatever. Maybe there is a larger monitor that could achieve this objective.

 

Ah, then the picture-by-picture feature isn't really what you want. You just need the biggest monitor you can afford. You can put a web page and a word document side by side on any monitor no matter what the size. A good solution for you might be a dual monitor setup. 2 17" LCDs or 2 19" LCDs would give you a huge amount of desktop space. And you can put one program on one monitor and a different program on the other.