//nedward.org

I may diss Microsoft Win­dows as a home Mac user, but I’ve always thought that it is a more pro­duc­tive OS. Work­ing in a cor­po­rate envi­ron­ment on a Mac is still such a headache, prob­a­bly because cor­po­rate IT is so built around MS tech­nolo­gies. What­ever the reason, I get things done on my work PC.

Dual-Display

It’s no secret that design­ers love screen real estate — but, every­one can ben­e­fit from more desk­top space. There was an arti­cle in the NY Times just last week.

The com­pany I work for is noto­ri­ously frugal, shall we say… so, a while back, I decided to break down and buy a dual-​display graph­ics card, out of my own pocket. I even dragged in my old 19″ Trini­tron mon­i­tor, which was col­lect­ing dust in the closet. For only $35, I bought an ATI Radeon 7000 32MB card, think­ing that it would be suf­fi­cient as a sec­ondary card.

Of course, as soon as I popped this into the vacant AGP slot in the Dell GX260, the computer’s on-​board AGP chip was dis­abled. Luck­ily, the card has two dis­play out­puts, and it even man­aged to put out a res­o­lu­tion of 1600 × 1200 for my main dis­play, and 1280 × 1024 for the sec­ondary mon­i­tor, (an aging 17″ Trini­tron that I “found” in an empty cubi­cle) — but only at 65 hz, and 16-bit color. I remem­ber think­ing that this would fry my eyes, but didn’t give it another thought.

Fast-​forward 5 months — my eyes are fried by the end of the day. So, I broke down yet again, and bought a $60 PCI card, a generic GeForce MX 4000 128MB card. Now every­thing is crisp at 75 Hz (the max these Trini­trons can do at high res­o­lu­tions), and 32-bit. Hope­fully I’ll notice a difference.

Remote Desktop

VPN access is retard­edly slow, (I real­ize I’m being redun­dant). So, rather than trying to work on net­work shares from home, I instead con­nect via Remote Desk­top to my work­sta­tion. This allows me to have access to every­thing I’d have sit­ting at my desk, from home. This is espe­cially handy when moving around large files on the net­work, or using Trados TM tools that require a dongle.

There is even a great Mac Remote Desk­top Client, so there is no need for me to fire up that 4-year old Dell laptop.

One annoy­ing thing about Remote Desk­top, espe­cially if you have mul­ti­ple dis­plays, is that when you return to your desk in the morn­ing and log in, your icons are usu­ally scat­tered across the main-display’s desk­top. Thanks to Icon Restore, two clicks, and you’re back, good as new. I’d love to see NVIDIA build this into their Desk­top Man­ager, the way ATI did with Hydravision.