Take caution when purchasing monitors if your primary consideration is a monitor's actual display size. Unless you are buying an LCD flat-screen monitor, when most other monitors are advertised as 15" or 17", they really do not have such a large display size!

Backtrack: As with TVs, the length diagonally from the monitor's top-left corner to its bottom-right corner determines a monitor's size. Monitors, however, normally show borders around their display areas. Thus, a 17" monitor may have a small border around its display area, making the true display size on the monitor 16" or even less.

Thus, when purchasing a monitor, check the manufacturers' fine print and read how much information can actually be displayed on a monitor, not just its diagonal size.

Of course, if you're worried about size, you also should be concerned about how many pixels can be displayed on a given monitor, but that's another story...

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