[kelleyk]

I'd suggest 2x24", which you can do for ~$180/each straight off of Newegg or ~$140-150 if you wait for a sale.

I recently had pretty much the same debate about upgrading my pair of 24" monitors, and wound up moving to 4x24" side-by-side in portrait mode. The extra real estate is totally worth it, but you get the added advantage of having that real estate divided up into screens, where you can maximize/tile windows more easily than on one huge display.

The cost is nice, too; the 4x24" monitors were only ~$700, so even with the extra $120 or so for a pair of decent stands off of Amazon, the damage isn't too bad.

(Just realized you're talking about an extra for a laptop, which makes the situation a bit different. Leaving this up anyhow in the hopes of provoking discussion---I'm curious what people do for multi-monitor setups.)