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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!"
...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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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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.