Andrew Gluck is a veteran financial reporter and the founder and CEO of Advisor Products Inc., a marketing company serving 1,800 financial advisory firms.| Free App For Using Two Monitors: Two Taskbars, One For Each Monitor |
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| Thursday, June 07, 2012 22:52 |
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Two monitors are better than one. That’s simple. But two taskbars — one for each monitor — is better still, especially when the app for managing two taskbars on two monitors is free.
This Website Is For Financial Professionals OnlyI’ve used several apps over the years for managing multiple monitors on one computer. The popular names include UltraMon, Display Fusion, and MultiMon. Those are all good. Since they are distributed as free or free-for-30-days, or in a premium paid version, they can be pretty fancy — too fancy, in fact.
If all you want is a simple taskbar to better utilize your second monitor, the way to go is Dual Monitor Taskbar. It’s been tested on Windows 7, according to the programmer distributing it.
I found the app on sourceforge.net, which is an open-source software distribution site where 3.4 million developers have distributed software in over 324,000 projects to more than 46 million consumers and that serves more than 4,000,000 downloads a day. SourceForge.net is owned and operated by Geeknet, Inc., a publicly traded US-based company.
Open Source software is not necessarily free. Dual Monitor Taskbar happens to be free, and many open source apps offer free versions, like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. But open source apps can be great because opening their source code allows other developers — or a community of developers — to integrate with them.
Dual Monitor Taskbar has received 136 reviews and 87% of them are positive. The negative reviews generally seem invalid, like the guy who complained it does work on Linux when the developer says its for Windows. Interesting that, this week alone, Dual Monitor Taskbar has been downloaded 3,468 times, but so few people take the time to review it.
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Thanks for the useful info on dual monitor programs. I have been using "Mouse Without Borders," an Microsoft Labs app for about 3 months now and it is also free. Although a beta, it has had several version updates and is now on 2.x. It also allows for up to 4 monitors. Give it a look.