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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 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.