Hooray! It’s a bit like Christmas at the moment. Not only did I win a $AU19,000 MSDN subscription at CodeCampSA on the weekend (feel free to add your comments as to whether I should keep it or give it away to a suitable cause), but finally my second monitor arrived this morning at ABB. I’ve been waiting 5 weeks for this, and there were times when I wondered if it would ever happen.

The new monitor is a HP L1950, which is the same screen size as my existing HP L1906, but most importantly has DVI input, and also a slightly narrower bezel.

My current machine is one of these dinky HP dc7800p ultra-slim desktops. To be honest, they’re probably fine for your average Microsoft Office user, but they are quite a bit under-specced for developing.

This is something that we’ve raised, and hopefully will be addressed soon either by extra RAM and a second hard drive, or (fingers crossed) some replacement boxes that are more in the “power workstation” class. I think this is critical, as we have a tight deadline and don’t want to waste time watching the hard disk LED glow brightly for 30 seconds at a time (freezing Windows) until it’s ready again.

After all, it’s not like I’m asking for three screens or anything!