You'll have at least three cables dangling around -- your laptop's power cable, your monitor's power cable, and the cable connecting your laptop to the display. To keep things in order ...

You will need to follow a few steps to set up your laptop to play well with the setup. For starters, you'll need a monitor, ...

If you prefer a stacked monitor setup, check out the Duex Float monitor extender that can extend your laptop screen vertically.