Well I'm building a new rig and was thinking I might get a new monitor as well. At the moment I have a 19" lcd so I was thinking of maybe getting something like a 24" then having both up at once. Is this hard to setup? What is required? Is it even possible or require special monitors? One last dumb question: I currently can only run at 1280/1024 maximum resolution, would this be because of my monitor or graphics card?

Your video card should support dual display for DUAL DISPLAY and set your video card to your monitors native resolution, otherwise the text characters will look funny.