Usually on a laptop the VGA connector just outputs a clone of the main screen, but It turns out my laptop actually supports dual monitors. After maybe a half hour of wrestling with xorg.conf (not quite plug and play, grrr) I got it to work, so now I’m playing around with the possibilities. It makes sense to me to have the second monitor display information I want to have up all the time, like tomboy notes, my im list, a music player maybe, and anything else I can squeeze in there.
I can’t put anything critical on that screen, since I’m not going to have it all the time, but it’s certainly extremely nice to have.
I was afraid for a while that I wouldn’t be able to have different resolutions on different monitors, but thankfully that’s not a limitation. I can have 1280×800 on my laptop and whatever I want on the outboard screen. Fun stuff.