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One ever-so-common output staple is going away, and not many people are going to miss it. That would be the big, clunky, desk-hogging tube monitor called the CRT (for cathode-ray tube). It's a flat-panel world now. Steve still has a certain fondness for CRTs, but he also has a rather large home office; when he can't figure out what one would put in the gained space behind a flat-panel, Angela informs him that most of us put our walls there.

Those big CRT monitors also produce a lot of heat, which wastes energy. And they deteriorate over time, so that a tube that looked pretty good five years ago probably doesn't look so hot today. And they weigh a lot! In fact, their only theoretical advantage is picture quality--the viewing angle is wide, so you don't have to sit right in front to see it--and, for gamers, CRTs' faster refresh speeds.

But both of those advantages go away with modern flat-panel monitors. Unless you're a graphics professional who needs the particularly accurate color you get on a big tube, you're going to prefer one of these skinny guys. (Or unless you're a professional cheapskate, says Steve, an amateur cheapskate who's extremely dedicated to his craft.) Tube monitors are cheap, cheap, cheap. But flat panels are getting there; prices have dropped about as much as Seinfeld stars' popularity, and the premium you'll pay to bump up to a flat panel isn't more than maybe a couple of hundred bucks, if that.

So the Duo are for once in agreement: It's time for you to look into (Ha! Is funny! Laugh!) a flat-panel monitor. But there are a few things worth knowing before you hit the stores. For openers, understand that unlike with CRTs, screen-dimension numbers are honest for flat panels. With a tube, you always end up with less than the official count. The rule of thumb for CRTs is to subtract two inches from the stated tube size to get the same size flat-panel screen. For instance, a 19-inch tube would be equivalent to a 17-inch flat panel.

Why is bigger better? In general, the bigger the screen, the more pixels you get, which lets you cram more on screen at once. A 15-inch flat panel gives you a resolution of 1024 by 768 pixels. A 17-inch monitor gives you a resolution of 1280 by 1024--two-thirds more stuff visible on the screen at once. But there's a catch: At least for now, 19-inch monitors gives you the same number of pixels as 17-inchers. So you don't see more info, you see everything a little bigger and, to Steve's eyes, usually a little grainier. If your vision's bad, the 19-inchers are probably the way to go.

But the Duo agree that for now, the 17-inch models are usually the best deal. You can get one for about $250, which isn't much more than you'll spend for a 15-inch model--and it's several hundred dollars less than you'd lay out for a 19-inch model. Now, just to confuse things, monitor makers are adding wide-screen models, which have two big advantages: They make it relatively simple to open two windows side-by-side (say for comparing prices while you're shopping online), and they're also handy for watching wide-screen movies. They're cheaper than ever, but they're not what anybody would call cheap ... yet.

If you really need a lot of screen space, and not for DVDs, consider doing what a lot of professionals have been doing for years, especially in the Mac world: Use multiple monitors mounted side-by-side. Increasingly, monitor makers are offering designs with narrow frames so you can place units closer than ever to each other. You'll need to install an extra video card for each monitor, or get a special video card that can handle multiple units. And it turns out that three is a better number of monitors than two, because Windows is too stupid to do things like figure out that you really don't want neatly centered dialog boxes that sit on the border between the screens. Macs handle this multiple-monitor thing a lot better, but even Windows users who need a lot of screen space will find that multiple monitors can provide it much more cheaply than buying a single big one.