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Dell Introduces Laptop With WUXGA
Cutie Pi writes "Dell has just released the Inspiron 8500, a new 15.4" widescreen notebook with a WUXGA screen--thats 1920x1200, high enough resolution to watch HDTV quality movies. Couple that with the new nVidia 64MB GeForce4 4200 Go (much faster than the ATI Radeon 9000), and you've got quite a notebook!! Can't wait to get my hands on one!"
... What is with Dell and their ugly-ass notebooks? Fucking BODY CLADDING, ala Landau roofs on Lincolns.. They're not fooling anybody..
Apple's got the prettiest notebooks by far, with Sony and IBM the only credible alternatives IMHO.. Dell stuff just looks like Taiwanese junk..
...and the NVIDIA video drivers cause the machine to blue screen once/week. Dell says that this is "an ongoing issue between Dell and Microsoft". There is no driver update available.
Dell sells a lot of stuff that's not ready for prime time - is the 8500 yet another example?
You realize some geeks are going to use this resolution to view more text on the screen at once and lose their eyesight that much faster, don't you? ...or just to have the same amount of text, but much sharper due the the increased resolution.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
much faster than the ATI Radeon 9000
What's that? The poster must have meant the ATI Mobility Radeon 9000, which is much different from the Radeon 9000 Pro AGP card.
I bought an Inspiron 7500 when the PIII 500 chips were first made available in laptops. It has been a few years now and this machine has been all over the US, banged up, dropped, kicked, etc. at jobsites, conventions & seminars. The only thing that has gone wrong with it have been the CD burning out playing CTP and the 'm' key jumping off. I hope the new line can stand up to the kind of abuse this one has because this machine is still kickin and I would certainly consider buying another one in the future.
Prospecting Stinks. Stop Wasting Time on Cold Calling.
if you're not into the whole mac thing
WUXGA = Wide Ultra eXtended Graphics Adapter
That's a lot of adjectives, and a whole lot
of pixel lovin'.
Well, as a Dell Inspiron 8100 user I would highly recommend waiting a little while prior to a purchase. Here's why:
My company loves Dell laptops (and they are very good)...however there seems to be a slight design flaw with the screens on the newer Inspiron body style...all of our keyboards are wearing through our monitors (when the laptop is closed and in the laptop bag)...The screen is too close. Now I cannot say if the newer ones will be the same, but all of ours have this problem. All of them. The tech supports guys say that it has something to do with the keyboards being screwed on too tight or something...I don't really care, what I do care is this, my screen will be broken way before this laptop needs replacing. Also I care that my screen looks really bad with all these scratches on the surface of it.
If you are considering purchasing a new Dell laptop for the clear crisp screen and all of it new real estate then I would try to determine that the new model doesn't have this same problem, otherwise your screen will look like crap in a couple of months.
And are drooling about this thing.
I speced one as close as I could to my 1GHz TiBook and it was the same price and the Dell did not include a SuperDrive equivalent.
So considering that the keyboard/mouse thingy has been replaced twice in my Dell Inspiron in 18 months, I think I will stick with my TiBook.
Looks like a nice machine other than the fact that I have seen too many Dell portables fall apart.
I went through the adding to cart process, and made a Dell with roughly the same specs as my Powerbook, now lets compare. My Powerbook -15.2 In Widescreen -1 Ghz G4 -1 Inch Thick -5 lbs w/drive and battery -CD-RW/DVD-R (standard) -1 Gig RAM -60 Gig HD (standard) -ATI 9000 w/64 MB (standard) -OS X Included Free -Price $2,836 shipped Dell -15.4 Inch Widescreen -2.2 Ghz P4 -1.5 inch thick -6.5 lbs without drive -CD-RW -1 Gig RAM -60 Gig Hard Drive ($130 extra) -Nvidia GeForce 4 4200 64 MB ($99 extra) -Win XP Professional ($79 extra) -Price $3436 Funny thing those consumers... the Powerbook is lighter, sleeker, has a DVD Writer, and is $600 friggin cheaper. Apple is overpriced my ass....
-Alex
I have a Thinkpad T30 with their 1400x1050 14" screen and LOVE it. It's enough room for two side by side pages or a web browser and a couple of IM windows. It's not real heavy and has been a serious workhorse. It's crashed once in the last 4 months, and that was due to new ATI drivers (that weren't official).
Some support the native resolution (for example, I can play Civ III or Warcraft III on my 17" FP iMac in 1440x900). This is fantastic.
Some will keep the screen at native resolution and give you bars on the borders (for example, a 1024x768 box inside my 1440x900 screen). This isn't so bad. Also not so bad is linearly downscaling the screen a little bit -- it's not as blurry as you might think, at least not for me in MacOS X -- displaying an 800x600 box inside a 1024x640 screen, for example.
What's annoying is when the game runs fullscreen in a 4:3 resolution and stretches it. This is what Diablo II / LOD does, so it smears 800x600 out laterally to fill the screen. The OS refers to this as a "stretched" resolution and it looks awful. I play this game in windowed mode and reduce my resolution so that it is a window that nearly fills the screen, with my desktop peeking out the sides. Better.
Nearly all the flat panels I see nowadays are in strange resolutions or aspect ratios (my 17" studio display is 5:4 while my iMac is 8:5), and the persistence of companies that continue to try to slap a new acronym on it like FUGA or BARGA is laughable. Just publish the dimensions and resolution, please.
Can't you see that everyone is buying station wagons?
About the only significant difference I see is the resolution - the Dell screen, while smaller, has a resolution of 1920x1200. The Apple screen is "only" 1440x900. This is a signficant difference in resolutions, and may partially explain the weight difference. More likely, though, it's simply case materials.
Of course, the Apple PowerBook G4 17" is $3299. Base (which includes a lot). A comparably configured Dell Inspiron 8500 (upgrade HD to 60GB, video to GF4Go, WUXGA video, 2 GHz CPU) is only $2657. And the Dell has a faster CPU (the 1 GHz G4 isn't going to beat a 2 GHz P4M in most tasks), more resolution (albeit a smaller screen), and a much, much longer standard warranty (3 years vs 1 year).
Oh, and yes, the Inspiron 8500 has 802.11b/g, standard. I don't think it has Bluetooth (the Powerbook does), but both have Gigabit ethernet and built-in modems. Both have CD-RW/DVD-R's, and half a gig of memory (upgradable on both). They're really pretty comparable as far as hardware goes. Which software you prefer is obviously up to you.
The Apple is lighter and (mostly) smaller. About the biggest difference is the height - 1" vs 1.5" is pretty major. The Apple is an inch wider, but that's probably not a big deal to most people.
That's not true. Windows GUI elements are tied to 96 PPI. If your screen resolution goes up to 144 DPI, then all your 16-pt fonts are now half again smaller.
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
And go update your drivers. You're obviously NOT running the latest ones.
My dad had bluescreen problems with his I8000 and obtained new drivers from *Windows Update* of all places. This was months ago.
I was using the latest Dell drivers from their website with no problems whatsoever. I don't think my 8200 has ever bluescreened even once.
And if you bothered to do ANY research at all, you would've found the D-Force (and related) modified INFs that are regularly maintained so that you can use your latest Detonator release with "Go" series of GeForces. Yes, I'm running the 41.09 Detonator release on my 8200 with full functionality.
BTW, Dell has some excellent user-to-user support forums if you go to their support website.
Oh yeah, and it runs Linux beautifully too.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
MacMall gives you 512MB RAM free.
Of course, you have to pay the $39.99 'install fee', but look at what Dell wants for more RAM, or what it'd cost you to buy the memory from NewEgg/etc
On a side note - $39.99 to pop the keyboard off and stick a DIMM in?!
A font that is meant to be 10pt will be 10pt on any screen or printed on paper, unless there is an error in the software rendering it. If you use a decent OS (one that knows about this) then 10pt will be perfectly readable on one of those Dells. In any OS that uses X, you can tell X what the physical resolution of your screen is, and it will adjust the points to pixels ratio to account for the screen size. I think plug 'n' play monitors should also send this info to the computer so it can all happen automatically.
Follow me
Both cards actually support 2048x1536. Dell just didn't have a screen that did this on a laptop before now. It's a new product, give them time. =)
-----------------------------------------
Remove the Greed which plagues mankind.
You can place orders online today:d el_inspn _inspn_8500.htm
http://www.dell.com/us/en/dhs/products/mo
But they show the "build time" at 25 days (compared with 5 days for an 8200).
So yes, you can buy this today. But you probably won't have it in your hands tomorrow.
I have one of those laptops. I use KDE, and I just set X to run at 133 DPI, which is the native DPI of the screen. Fonts are *extremely* crisp, and the same size as they would be on any other display. 12pt means 12/72 (1/6) of an inch, not 12 pixels. If you set things correctly (pass the -- -dpi 133 option to X, or change the DPI setting in Windows) pretty much everything should scale just fine, and you get a huge payoff in readibility.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
That's why when I bought my Inspiron 8200 back in December, I only ordered it with 128MB, and ordered a 512MB chip from Crucial.
My only issue was, when I was running several application, I would notice a slow down. I would get frequent messages from XP stating that it was going to resize my pagefile.
Well, a week or so ago, I decided to check things out. Since I ordered my laptop with 128MB, Dell had set the pagefile to: minimum 128MB/maximum 384MB. Why they don't just leave it on auto is beyond me. But just be warned if you decide to go the route I went.
"Would it help to set the fonts bigger or isn't that an option?"
Yeah, you can. Although my experience with Win2k (my laptop is XP and they MIGHT have fixed that) is that changing the font size can screw things up, especially web browsing. I've noticed that setting the fonts to larger can mangle table sizes on websites and break them. I've also noticed that text doesn't always fit in its buttons like the 'submit' button.
Also for me in particular, this is a problem because I bought my laptop to run Lightwave. The buttons on it are fixed-width fonts, and they do not respond to fonts designated by the Windows theme. I cannot change the font on it that I know of. So for me (I doubt a significant amount of people have this laptop and run Lightwave on it...) that's not an option.
Things might be different in XP, but I wouldn't count on it. Either the text will be the wrong size and break the page, or it'll be too small, thus defeating the purpose of it. Fortunately, I use Opera and it has a true magnification button instead of changing the font size.
First, let's try a SONY 23"
Then, we have a Samsung 24"
Of course we can't forget the Apple 23"
All rated at 1920x1200. Now, if you want cheap, Dell makes a FP2000 at 1600x1200 (20") that can usually be gotten for under 1000. Too bad they sell out faster than hot cakes.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You cant go above 12x10 on a standards LCD because a stardard single DVI-D link can only supply that much information to the monitor. A dual DVI-D link could provide 1920x1200, but no videocards seem to implement dual DVI.
See http://www.rell.com/pdfs/DSG_ssLCD-240t.pdf -- Maximum Digital Resolution: 1280x1024 @60Hz
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
I know this is coming late, but i hope i can help you with the swap file issue. The best way to set up a swap file in Windows is the same way as in UNIX and every other OS out there - give it a fixed size. This saves hard-disk thrashing during resizing, plus you get the bonus of a "real" idea of how much space you have on your disk. All my PCs have used a swap file set to 1024MB min/max (regardless of RAM) for years, and you'll find this keeps everything running very smoothly, and you're very unlikely to ever run out of memory. A gig is no big deal if your harddisk is over 10 gigs, and it's WAY worth it for the extra performance.
Try Mozilla for this. I.E.'s font resizing is terrible.