Ken-
Yeah, it really makes it easier when there's a ton of things open all at once. I had a 17" monitor connected to my laptop that I used for the my last 3 years of college. I always had to have a word doc, PDF, and excel spreadsheet open at the same time. A friend of mine suggested I get 23" monitors instead of 24", as that extra inch costs about $50. I'm going to get a 2TB drive for data, and two 500GB drives, one each for Windows and Ubuntu since they need to be formatted differently. Plus if one craps out I still have functionality. Someday I'd like to get SSDs for the OS's, but they're still rather expensive.