Design software comes with free monitor

Altium has come up with a special offer that will enable its customers to gain productivity benefits from using multiple monitors with their design software.

Altium has come up with a special offer that will enable its customers to gain productivity benefits from using multiple monitors with their design software.

In recognition of the productivity benefits gained with multimonitor setups, Altium is offering customers a free Samsung 18in flat panel LCD monitor with the purchase of a Protel or P-CAD full suite new license, and with Tasking toolset purchases of US $9995 and above.

This offer, which ends on 28th June 2002, emphasises Altium's commitment to breaking down the barriers to innovation and technological advancement by providing its customers with the tools they need to stay on the cutting edge of design.

In addition, Altium's Protel users will benefit from the native support for multi-monitor setups within the fully integrated design environment of the upcoming Protel DXP.

"Displaying on-screen information over more than one monitor has significantly increased productivity, especially for people dealing with large amounts of information on the desktop at any one time", says Phil Loughhead, Protel Product Manager, Altium.

"Due to the increasing complexity of electronics designs and the number of stages in the design process, electronics engineers and designers have several windows of information in different editors open at once.

If they can reorganise these design data over two screens, they are able to decrease their visual clutter and improve their productivity".

Another significant advantage of multiple monitors for electronics design is the ability to see two different parts of the design at once, without needing to switch back and forth between editors.

For example, a designer can simultaneously look at the schematic on one monitor and compare it to the PCB or bill of materials on the other.

Although Loughhead estimates that only 5-10% of desktop designers currently take advantage of a multimonitor setup, he believes that a recent groundswell of interest could result in another 20% moving to this setup.

"In the last 12 months, the necessary hardware to support a multimonitor setup sufficiently large monitors and capable graphics cards has only just become affordable for most designers.

This pricing strongly complements the native support for multimonitor setups that has just become available with the release of operating systems such as Windows XP".

Until June 28, 2002, Altium will give customers a free Samsung 181T 18in flat panel monitor with every purchase of Protel 99 SE full suite new licenses, P-CAD 2001 full suite new licenses, and Tasking toolsets purchases of US $9995 and above.

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