Advantages to widescreen LCD monitors?

Greater workspace and viewing distance aren't real advantages over regular monitors, though.

1. The vertical resolution for widescreen is usually lower than for comparable regular monitors, so the effective workspace isn't necessarily bigger. You gain a little space to the left and right, but you lose it to the top and bottom.

2. Most computer tasks like text processing and web browsing are much more comfortable on a regular monitor with 4:3 or 5:4 aspect ratio, due to increased vertical resolution over comparable widescreen monitors.

3. Viewing distance is determined entirely by the size of the monitor and not its aspect ratio.

4. Many widescreen monitors come with an odd native resolution. If you plan on playing games, you'll probably run into many titles that don't support your monitor's native resolution and interpolation is always lackluster. Besides, only a handful of games are optimized to work with widescreen resolutions, anyway.

The only benefits of widescreen monitors are for movie playback, and this only pays off if you're using the screen primarily for watching movies and nothing else.

Jam it back in, in the dark.