A personal computer is no good without a good monitor. Sure, computers are great at crunching numbers, but most of the time we’re surfing the web, dealing with emails, looking at photos or videos, and that requires a decent monitor. Many computers come with a monitor, but you may want to upgrade, and very often the great deals on computers come without a monitor. How can you get a really good monitor for cheap, or better yet, for free?

Now anyone can spend money on a monitor and buy whatever they want, and if you’re short on time and big on money, this is a reasonable thing to do, but there are plenty of monitors out there that won’t cost much.

First of all, the older monitors use CRT or cathode ray tube technology and are big, bulky and heavy, but many of them have large screens and absolutely wonderful graphics quality. Once you get the heavy beasts in place, they absolutely move. You can often get them for free! Yes, it’s pretty amazing, but people ditch the perfect monitors for the latest and greatest, that might not be the best quality! In my town you have to pay ten bucks to the landfill to get your monitor removed! So where do you find one of these monitors? Searching online locally is the best bet. Try Craigslist and Freecycle.org, for example, and you might find someone giving away a great monitor for free or selling it dirt cheap. Works; I did and got a rather heavy 24″ monitor with years of life and absolutely wonderful video quality.

Modern monitors use LCD or liquid crystal display technology and are also called flat panel monitors. Its biggest advantage is not the quality of the video, but the size and weight. They are thin and light. They can also cost quite a bit, but you can find decent ones online for around $100. Of course, you can also search Craigslist and eBay for used ones, and refurbished models are a good bet too; try some of the major vendor websites like Dell Computer.

I like to search Amazon for LCD monitors that are selling at a deep discount. You may need to look around a few times, but this often means the monitor has been discontinued and they’re throwing out what few they have left at a very low price.