Living with a Laptop: Dual Displays (Premium)

As many of you know, I’m not a fan of using multiple displays, but doing so can be particularly problematic with a docked laptop configuration. Given this, I went into the next phase of my experiment of using a laptop fulltime with a bit of trepidation. And after weeks of experimenting, I’m pretty much back where I started.

It’s been over a month since I wrote the previous post in this series, so it’s understandable if anyone was wondering whether I’d drifted off and forgotten about it completely. But that’s not the case: I have literally been using this laptop—a 15-inch HP Envy 15—as my main computer since an early August lightning strike took down my Intel NUC. And I’ve been struggling to figure out a dual-display configuration that makes sense for me.

This problem hasn’t just delayed part 3 of this series, it’s delayed my review of the HP Envy 15, too: Because it’s so unsatisfactory moving between using the PC as a standalone laptop and docked as a pseudo-desktop PC, I’ve stopped undocking it. I just use it as if it were a desktop PC, and rarely as a laptop. That doesn’t make for much of a review, I know.

But that’s terrible on a second level because the very point of this exercise is to discover whether one PC could serve as both my daily use “desktop” PC and as my primary laptop. Unfortunately, I just find the difficulty of transitioning between the two states so difficult that’s sort of not worth it, given my working habits and the specific docked configuration I use. And let’s face it, thanks to OneDrive, moving between different PCs is seamless, so having both a (small) desktop PC (the NUC) and a laptop is actually pretty efficient.

But still. I’ve always felt that it’s important to testing doing things differently, even if you end up back where you started. And I want to keep making progress, both on this stalled series and with my review of the Envy 15.

Just writing this article solves the first of these problems, allowing me to move on soon to another topic I’m itching to get to in this series, which is using this laptop as a gaming machine. I’ve played games almost exclusively on Xbox since the release of the Xbox 360, and with Xbox Series X arriving in less than two months, this is a good time for me to experiment.

And I’m going to solve the second problem by bringing the HP Envy with me when I travel to North Carolina for the better part of a week next week. My wife and I are dropping our daughter off at college on Monday—belatedly because of COVID-19—and we’re going to take a few days off to explore Charlotte and Asheville and get in our first travel in since February, albeit by car. But that means I’ll be able to get better battery life data for the Envy and some nice real-world experience traveling with it. So I can write my review with that experience in mind at least.

But first things first. Let’s talk dual displays.

The use of dual-displays—really, any number of displays; I’m just trying to keep this simple here—is well-understood in the PC space. From developers to engineers to power users of all kinds, spreading out work across two (or more) displays is a common daily experience. And it’s not just power users, either. In a weird coincidence, I poked my head into my wife’s office upstairs the other day and was reminded that she, the most normal and least technical of users, actually uses two displays: One on her desk and one built-in to her laptop. Which is brought up to eye level, unceremoniously, using a discarded box of some kind. Funny.

At a high-level, using a second display is pretty-straightforward: You connect it using wires or, via Miracast, wirelessly to your PC and then determine whether the second display will be used exclusively (replacing the primary display) or in tandem with the primary display with a single extended desktop across both. (You can also simply duplicate the primary display onto the second display but that rarely makes sense in a productivity scenario. There are a few ways to configure things, but anyone using two or more displays needs to know about the following interfaces:

Project pane. Type WINKEY + P to switch from Duplicate (the default configuration) to Extend.

Display settings. Visit Display settings (Settings > System > Display) to further configure each display at least once.

Taskbar settings. Visit Taskbar settings (Settings > Personalization Taskbar) at least once to determine how the taskbar works across multiple displays.

If you’re using a desktop PC with a second display, there’s not much else to do. But if you’re using a laptop with a second display, as I am, that’s where the trouble can start, assuming you plan to move between using the laptop in a docked set-up with a second display and using it as a standalone laptop with its single built-in display.

I’ll just cut to the chase and tell you plainly that if you plan to do this, that second display should match your laptop’s internal display as much as possible: Same resolution, same aspect ratio, and, if possible, even the same physical size (or at least the same display scaling). Otherwise, when you detach from the second display, all of your open windows will reappear on the built-in display incorrectly. They’ll be too big or too small, will be in the wrong location, and/or will need to be manually resized and adjusted every time. It’s maddening.

This problem, incidentally, is particularly acute with Microsoft’s Surface PCs, which use a non-standard 3:2 aspect ratio and non-standard (and, across models, inconsistent) resolutions. Good luck finding a 3:2 external display. (And this is why I’ve long pressured Microsoft to sell a Surface Display.)

For the HP Envy I’m using, however, the issue is that the laptop’s internal display is 4K/UHD at 16:9 and I only have 1080p and 1440p external displays (also 16:9), so they just don’t match up. And while this is kind of a strange problem to have, the HP’s built-in display is so good—so bright and colorful and vibrant—that it makes the external displays I do have look like crap by comparison. Ah well.

I’ve fiddled with a few different configurations, but in the end, I configured the Envy to only use the external display when docked, and I can leave the laptop’s display lid close and work as I did on the NUC. But when I undock it, I have to fiddle with the size/position of all the apps I use for the reasons noted above. And that’s why this isn’t ideal for me.

Maybe I’ll have better success with gaming on the PC.