Ways To Add a Second Monitor for Laptop and Boost Productivity
The main reason why people tend to invest in laptops is that they provide great portability, and most laptops are designed to be compact.
There may be many upsides to this portability factor, but the one downside to being designed to be compact is that it results in a much smaller display size as compared to the many monitors that are currently on the market.
This decreased display size in turn affects the user’s productivity as well mainly due to the fact that less display means less space to organize your files and even lesser space to multitask. However, there is one solution that completely negates this limitation: investing in a second monitor for laptop.
Products like the Duex Plus second monitor for laptop from Mobile Pixels have been specially designed for laptops, in order to boost productivity. Let us discuss this in a bit more detail, talking about some ways through which you can utilize the second monitor for laptop to get the most out of it.
Tips To Boost Your Productivity with a Second Monitor
1. Line Up the Monitors
This is especially effective for triple monitor setups but can be just as effective when you own a second monitor for laptop as well.
There are several instances where the monitors that you own may be of a different brand or model, due to which lining them up may prove to become a little more difficult than normal.
An example of this is that if you are pairing your laptop screen with an external monitor, due to the different sizes of both monitors, some weird behavior might occur between the two screens, but they are easy to fix and line up.
In order to line two different monitors up perfectly, you have to do more tweaking to the display ratios and the resolution as well.
You have to go to the display option that is located in the settings of your laptop, where you will find some rectangles that would signify the second monitor for laptop that you have plugged in.
While in here, you are able to manually adjust these squares so that their orientation is in such a way that it is perfectly lined up with each other. This can involve a little trial and error process first to make sure that both are lined up perfectly, and there are no distortions in the process.
2. Make Both the Monitors Match
There may be a case where the external monitor that you are connecting with your laptop may be one that will have 4K capabilities, while your laptop screen would only be 1080p.
When facing such a case, it is recommended to go to your display settings and scroll until you reach the scale and layout section, where you can adjust the resolution and scaling of both monitors as well so that they can match each other.
Using this adjustment option, you can make it so that in this case you can set the monitor with the lower resolution to its native resolution while increasing the scaling of the high-resolution monitor. What this does is that it ensures that your desktop display appears the same size on both monitors.
3. Make Some Changes to Your Taskbar
Another effective way to make sure that your second monitor for laptop is added to your setup in a way that can boost your overall productivity is to make some tweaks to your taskbar.
On the default settings, windows will make it so that the taskbar is extended all the way to both of the monitors that you have set up. This can be useful at times, but you can further improve it as well.
In order to access the settings for your taskbar, simply right-click anywhere on the taskbar and choose the taskbar settings option.
You might be bombarded with a number of options pertaining to the appearance and functionality of your taskbar, but it is recommended to go to the multiple display section first so that you can make it, so the taskbar only appears on your primary display, or vice versa, depending on your preferences.
Wrap-up
This was a small and condensed guide that provided some of the ways you can design your second monitor for laptop to get the most out of it.
Although a multi-monitor setup is pretty useful in itself, there are many other ways through which you can further boost your productivity as well, and certain options you can utilize in order to optimize your desktop setup as well.
