Traveling around to different forums and conversing with all types of people throughout the day, I sometimes get a chance to find out what people do, and most interestingly, see their computer setups.  I have talked to people with some crazy setups, and people with just a simple setup of one PC, even if they have a job which involves heavy computer work.

This is my current setup:

Going from left to right I will start with my Mac Mini with a 19” widescreen running Leopard.  I use this for some personal work, and I also use this as my “communications” machine.  What I mean by that is, this is the computer where I run things like Twitter, IM, Skype, IRC, etc.  It lets me do more work on my other two PC’s and keeping this open for everything else.  I have an Apple wireless keyboard connected to it, which I really like as it’s very small so it saves quite a bit of space. I have no complaints here, but I really need to upgrade to a bigger monitor.

Next up I have my “main” PC which is a custom built rig with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Nvidia video card, and 2GB of RAM.  It’s hooked up to a 22” widescreen and this has Vista Ultimate on it with XP as a VM via Parallels.  While I do a bit of everything on this PC, during a “normal” work day I keep Impulse open on this machine, and browsers which keep an eye on WinCustomize, JoeUser, etc.  And obviously this is the machine I run most games on as it is the most powerful of the three, although my laptop can handle most games I throw at it.

Last is my HP laptop with a 17’ screen.  This machine runs Vista Home Premium and I use this machine for mostly everything else like writing articles, recording podcasts, making videos/screencasts, and all the other stuff I do throughout the week.  I have the main PC and my laptop connected with Multiplicity, which allows me to control both PC’s with one mouse and keyboard.  That is very handy especially when needing to transfer files to one PC from another, I really couldn’t work without it.  I also have a couple external hard drives which I mostly use for backups, and some media storage.

So even though I have these three computers going all day (and sometimes all night), it still seems like it’s just not enough to get everything done.  The latest addition to this setup is the 22’ monitor, which is so much more helpful during the day.  It’s amazing how much more screen real estate you get, and I take advantage of every inch of it.  I also have a 12” iBook sitting on the couch, but I think it’s time I put that on eBay as I really don’t use it anymore.  So this is my current setup, and I don’t see it changing drastically anytime soon.  How many computers do you use during the day, and what does your setup look like?