Fry’s had a sale on 17″ LCD monitors this weekend so I picked one up. $170 after rebate is a heck of a deal! It does 1280×1024 and looks really good with only one pixel stuck on and no dead ones. The coolest thing is that the power consumption, as measured by the UPS, is a lot lower. The old CRT monitor had it at 50.1% of max load when on, and 30.8% when off. The LCD is at 31.2% when on standby and 32.8% when turned on. That translates out to 6 more minutes of on-battery time which is significant.

Configuring X11 to run with it was painless and even watching full motion video looks good.

The other plus of this is that I got to redo the layout of the desk and have it a lot more ergonomically arranged now.