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-display...