My new PC and my work system have the wide format monitors, and while at first I thought they were new and cool, I'm starting to dislike them for every day work.

There's too much dead space, the fonts have to be smaller to maintain proportion, and there's a lot of mousing around to get from one side to the other. The only plus I can think of is for watching movies, and then split screen applications which I don't do.

So I closed up the PC and plugged in my old 4:3 monitor, and I'm much happier! I guess I'm old fashioned.

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Has a lot to do with the quality of the monitor and the video driver you have loaded. Some monitors will only have a sharp picture at their smallest resolution. Others will work well at several different settings. Also, some drivers will not support the resolution you want. Best to go online and load the latest driver for your video card/chip. We have bought some cheap monitors here and it is tough setting them up for the users to be able to see

Not a fan of the wide screen TV's either.

But, try and find a decent 4:3 anymore.................

I still dig the 4:3 format for a lot of computer work.

A couple of years ago, I picked up a pair of Dell 20" 4:3 monitors (native resolution 1600 x 1200) from a local software developer secondhand . Very nice! If I had the room, I'd be running them both side-by-side.

In addition to what Bab mentioned. If yo do go back to your wide monitor, you can use Ctrl + or Ctrl - to increase and decrease your screen size fora easier reading. As for te mouse, you can go to your control panel and adjust the speed of your cursor so that it will move across the screen with less mouse movement.

Just some ideas.

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Many 16:9 monitors I come across now actually have a rotating mount that lets you turn it 90 deg. If you deal with long columns rather than many rows, this may be a good option for you.

When you rotate the monitor, you have to go into the video properties and turn on the "rotate" feature and flip the screen to match the monitor.

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Here at the paper, the page designers use the wide screens flipped. That way they can see a whole page at once.
At my desk in IT, I run three 20' monitors side by side by side. Gives me one screen for the helpdesk (I have to fix things), one for email (ditto) and the center one for everything else (like PP). I do run a rotateable at home and like it.

Going wide without going big (24" or larger) on a desktop can be frustrating.

In the Printing and Sign business, a large monitor is great.

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Agreed.

As much as I like the 4:3 format for some stuff, I do have some applications where the user interface works well with a left/right split. For that, a 24" wide screen (1920 x 1200) does the job for me. A 20" 4:3 (1600 x 1200) complements it nicely in a dual-monitor setup.

When our company upgraded everyone to the widescreen flat panels, I specifically requested two of the 4:3 aspect monitors that were being retired.

I use them as dual monitors and get way more done than if I had a single widescreen...

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It took me a while to get used to my 16:9 screen but now I love it. I don't even use my old 4:3, its just sitting around even though its a good LCD. I think the change came about when my work laptop was exchanged for a newer one with a 16:9 screen (I had no option), I found working with spreadsheets much easier since I could see the rows further across and didn't have to side scroll nearly as much.

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Seems like size matters, in this case. I briefly tried the vertical orientation today and its interesting, but it cuts off the right side of some of our web apps. Its nice for running Linux telnet though. So a combination of a wide screen and a square one seems to be the way to go, if you have the space for it.

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1999 Toyota Tacoma

I use two wide-screens rotated to give me an (approx) 2000 x 2000.

I then run 4 virtual desktops.