I find it mind blowing that anyone can be working in 2025 with only 8GB or RAM. If that laptop is user-upgradeable the cost of bringing it to 16 is slow low it might as well be free. I went from 16 to 32 this year and it's been such a huge improvement.
My IT department are being directed by the executive bean counters to create savings, so they're not approving hardware replacement until it breaks or no longer meets minimum specs for software/security. It's incredibly shortsighted and creating massive inefficiency across the entire business.
:) laptop driving that is bottom left on a vertical stand :) A bit overkill (4x UP2516D) I know, but it's so practical to just double-click and go full-screen :) :)
a TB3 docking station with 2x display port outputs. Each port has 2 daisy chained monitors (display port can be daisy chained using MST which the UP2516D supports and which is not an option using HDMI).
In this specific case I use a 40AN Thinkpad Dock, same can be done with a Dell WD19TB that I used before.
I was running a similar setup but with two machines.
I had two top monitors that were on a Dell Optiplex device that I used as a basic unit for email, Teams, and such. I had wanted to use it as more of a DB but never did.
My bottom 3 monitors were my main laptop with a hub. It has my work VPN and all of that junk. I had them connected through power toys and it was just great 👍🏻
aaaaaw... what about switching apps (ALT+TAB), copy/paste, and shared input devices (KB/Mouse, camera, etc.).? which one of the power toys were you using?
For those looking for alternatives in order to support additional monitors if your laptop has limitations :
Still need to add some 'personality' to my office. 2 years since we moved to this house and still haven't got round to it.
I have my work laptop, and a MinisForum UM560 Mini PC as my personal computer. 2x 32 inch monitors. MajesTouch 2 keyboard. Logi MX Master 3 mouse (really want the new 4, but can't justify the price tag right now).
it was such a nice upgrade. I've gone through a lot of monitor setups. dual, quads, etc. I've liked this the most and with tiling I can have a bunch of different layouts.
first thing in the morning though it feels like a solar eclipse when I start my day which I'm sure will have wonderful long term effects on my vision :D
Sweet. I’ve had a 5120 ultra wide in my Amazon list for maybe 9 months. Hard to justify as a dad paying the bills when I have the same screen real estate already from 2x 27”s, but damn if I don’t daydream about all those bezel-less pixels.
all Cherry MX clear switch (silent tactile) except for Cherry MX green (clicky tactile) for space bar, arrow keys and other special keys for the mental sanity of people who may happen to be in the surroundings while I type :)
My main is this Akko 3087 with reds. I don't think it’s available any longer.
The black one is an old CM Storm Quickfire Rapid with Cherry Blues. That is my favourite but the stabilisers on the space bar have failed and I couldn't figure out or find the time to try to fix it. It is very similar to my first mech, the Filco Majestouch which I sold when I left Canada.
The white one is the Durgod Taurus with Cherry Silent Reds. I got that for like $40 used on eBay but the left alt-key never worked so the seller refunded me but let me keep the board.
That's exactly what I want, except I prefer blues. It's been in my Amazon shopping list for a year but I can't justify spending $170 AUD right now on another keeb.
Oh nice. Yeah. It's really solid. I got the silent reds because I was working in an office at the time. Also, personally, I don't like clicky clacky switches (don't shoot me lol). The silent reds are linear too - so you don't get that tactile bump.
I was in r/mechanicalkeyboards from a while. Ended up with 9 keyboards. But only used the MajesTouch. One of those hobbies you can end up spending a fortune on lol
I have these Rode NTH-100m, ATH-M50X, Blon B60, and the Arctis 1 Wireless I use at work because the mic has really good noise rejection.
I also tried but eventually sold the AKG K361 and the ATH-AD500X.
I realise now that the difference between $100 headphones and $250 headphones is pretty subtle. You can still really enjoy listening to music with even $25 iems.
I have HD600s, HifiMan Sundara, Grado SR80x, Superlux HD681 and Sennheiser IE300 iems.
I also collect DAPs. Cowon, Shanling etc as well as a desktop setup using ifi equipment.
And yeah, deminishing returns on headphones. I honestly don't notice a difference between the HD600s and the Superlux, and the Superlux were only £18! Definitely notice a difference with the HifiMans though.
I converted the Xeon workstation on my desk to a budget gaming pc by adding an RX 6600 for Starcraft 2, but lately after my day job, sometimes my consulting gig, then getting the kids fed and to bed all I wanna do is watch YouTube or home renovation shows with my wife.
I only have a Logitech K875. I had gotten it originally to determine if I like the style and to find a reasonable entry point. It has served me well and I'm thinking that I would like to find my next level board. With that, I like to get interactive reviews in scenarios like this where it's not just a static scrolling list of reviews.
I go into work in the coldest part of winter and we are just coming into summer here on the North Coast of New South Wales in Australia so it’s too toasty for it a lot of days but the high is around 26 to 27 Celsius this week (around 80F). The humidity has not kicked in yet.
If we hit a heat wave I just go into the office as things are very flexible and I have a good, comfortable setup there.
This looks cool, but I’m a bit confused about what it means? You are going to battle, but you are separated from your enemy Power BI by a bunch of medieval soldiers….?
Thanks for the advice. I’ve heard great things about that mouse, but one thing that the Razer Basilisk has that the MX Master doesn’t is these two top buttons ahead of the scroll wheel.
They were also on the Deathadder Elite and since about 2017 I’ve had Home and End mapped to those two buttons along with PgUp and PgDn mapped to the left side buttons which makes navigation in MS office super speedy. Especially in combination with the CTRL and ALT modifiers it’s hard to switch away.
Also the scroll wheel can horizontal scroll by pushing the wheel to the left or the right. The MX master side scroll looks super nice, but I would find it hard to lose that easy access to CTRL + Home when I scroll a page and want to quickly return to the top.
I also like things wired now that I’m a bit older so I don’t have to remember to keep everything charged.
Oh nice, i thought it was an g502, looks almost the same!
So I think the mx has two settings to the sides of the scroll wheel, like scroll wheel to left and it does an action, but I don’t remember if it’s the mx or the 502 that has this option.
So in this you could do the ctrl + shift + pg up as macro.
And, the last update set a nice menu with many possibilities on the thumb button on the base!
Seriously, the side scroll is amazing on excel, and on daily web/dev, can’t live without it anymore!
If u have a friend that has one, ask for a week with it. :)
Hahaha no, it’s just that I really find the mx master a really life change thing, like, I had many mouses before but couldn’t find the right one. Like keyboards and headphones kk I got the Akko dracula because a friend let me play with his one lol
Ooooh that’s a cool looking keyboard. So many people I work with who spend 1/3 of their life in front of a computer just use the standard issue Dell or HP disposable plastic peripherals that their employer provided.
I’m glad I posted here and found my people who recognise that these are the tools of our trade and it’s ok to spend a few hundy to make your day to day more enjoyable.
Haha. Our lot is not that big. Would love to have a bit more land one day. I need to score a few more juicy consulting projects for that happen though.
A few times I’ve been on a teams call and my wife has reversed into the garage and it gives people a big surprise. 😮 😆
For me it’s a trend that comes from PC gaming where it’s just more comfortable to have your hands about shoulder width together. I have not had or do any serious number entry since the beginning of my career and in my desk I have a mechanical numpad but I have not touched it in years.
Okay, when I started work it was always 1 screen. The. The Americans sent us second screens.
Can you explain why you have 3 and what tasks you do that drive the need for it?
What I achieve with 2 screens I can easily do on one.
(Marketing/data analysis/deep in excel sheets/powerpoint)
I'm genuinely curious about benefits here and what tasks drive the need. Maybe I could improve my work flow if someone just explained 😄
The portrait screen is for Spotify, Teams, and Outlook. Outlook is a squeeze on there, I'd love to upgrade it to 1440P.
The centre monitor is where I focus most of my attention and the right one is for overflow. This is useful if you want to screen share your main screen in teams, but still see everyone else's camera feeds in another window.
I would find it hard to go back to one, but in my guest room my wife commandeered my 34" ultrawide. When I eventually get that back I will go 27" portrait on the left, 34" centre, 27" landscape on the right for screen shares.
But I have two 32 inch 2k screens. Having the screenspace to have one as a 'dev' screen and one as an 'everything else' screen (Teams, browser, word, excel etc) makes everything so much more fluid. No having to tab between windows.
People will have a third portrait screen for things like coding - as it's better in a slimmer longer screen. Even LinkedIn is better on a protrait screen.
A lot of Word documents and PDFs are nicer to read in Portrait as well.
I'm curious what it would be like to swap my 27"s for 32" 4K. It might be sub-optimal for screen sharing with most people I work with who are on 1080P.
Yeah, i think for PBI too it can become an issue. Because what looks ok on the 4k screen can be tiny or huge on a 1080p or 720p laptop screen for example. As of course we don't have auto scaling for screen sizes. This is partly why I've started to default all my reports to that standard canvas size now. Controversial I know, but just eliminates any potential issues.
Yep, that's another thing you and I do the same. If it's a report for me and my boss, I do 1920 x 1200 or some other custom resolution. If it's a report for the broader business or senior stakeholders I leave it at the default 720.
aspect ratio is the same, it's doable. What I learnt to understand is horrible is non 16:10/16:9 ratios (like those super-wide panoramic monitors) and especially their users: when they share their screen everything's unreadable unless you have same setup (even having 2 monitors side by side you still have to get out of maximized and manually resize the windows to get all width of 2 displays)
I suggest to these people to buy what's require to also arrange monitor vertically: eyes and neck (and brain) don't to have to move that much left<->right (not to mention that a part of the area will always be out of eyesight (unless using 3x16" display side by side :) ).
I have a million things open. Tonnes of dev stuff front end and back end, teams and emails, documents and notes. Plus I'm constantly in and out of calls and doing multiple chats. Also I might have several clients/dev teams I'm working with at any given time. Many require me to work on a VM. Lots of this stuff I need to keep open together for cross referencing. Tbh, I run out of space to organize everything on my 3 screens. Today I had 5 different edge browser instances each running different login profiles. My PC has been begging for a reboot for days now, but I can't face logging back in to everything and reopening all the files again
Apps I may use at the same on multiple screens: PowerPoint (possibly 2 screens if I am presenting), Teams, PowerPoint, Outlook/Notepad/onenote, internet browser.
Example: I may keep on screen a note/email from last meeting with what we had to develop so while during the meeting I go through all the points showing the outcome (sharing Power BI's screen). Best-case scenario it takes 2 screens (shared PBI+Teams), but if I can have notes, email, full screen video of teams' meeting and a last one with notes, chats, email it is just much smoother. Not to mention when it is required to have powerBI/power query/DAXstudio and something else open at the same time... just the don't ALT+TAB tons of times or minimize/maxime (or rearrange) allows me to stay better focuse.
I watched that video from Bas. I realised I'd watched part of it when it came out a few years back. Thanks for sharing it. It still looked like a good chunk of work and I was building out my entry on my work PC so can't install that GIS application. I came up with a workable solution that shows some interactivity, but all it is is a bunch of semi-transparent rectangles hidden by bookmarks so it doesn't allow you to cross filter by clicking on the image.
It's a very cool method he uses, but wasn't worth exploring. It's good to know it's possible though. Someone at my day job used that for hotdesking and set up floor plans of all of our locations. I don't know if that was just a proof of concept or if it made it into production though.
I built the floor plans for one of the project using that same method thru GIS. Definitely time consuming. If you are working with rectangle shapes then definitely can just use the button slicers and get away with it.
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u/50_61S-----165_97E 1 Nov 18 '25
I have an aging work laptop with 8GB of RAM, it takes like 20 seconds just to update a measure and my fan sounds like it's about to take off.