Choosing a laptop for a friend
A friend sent me an email this week asking me to check up on a laptop he was thinking of buying. After first being amazed at what you can get for so little cash I noticed one thing about it that didn't add up. It has a 15" screen but has a maximum resolution of 1024*768. I replied to the mail and told him to look for one with a bigger resolution. This confused him and so he rang me. What did I mean he asked? It's got a big screen, what's the problem. I then tried to explain the concept of pixels and resolution as simply as possible. Whether or not he got it I don't know but he has agreed to wait a day while I try and find a better one.
My first port of call was Epinions.com to have a look at laptops in his price bracket of sub $1000 (he's working in America at the moment). What surprised me was that they all seemed to have 14.1" and bigger TFT screens but none of them supported anything more than 1024 pixels. What am I missing? Is it because of the price? My Dell has a 14.1" display and runs a nice crisp 1400*1050 pixels. Doesn't sound like much but, as I'm sure you guys will appreciate, it makes all the difference. Not sure what to do. Should I maintain that he really wants a better display or should I let him go and buy something with a lower resolution when his main use will to be to watch DVDs?
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I own a Gericom Masterpiece 9000 2,5GHz, comes with a Radeon 9000 and 15" SXGA (1400x1050), but you have to pay a bit less than 1500EUR. I really recommend spending a few bucks more, its really fast. You can run Domino server under Linux in VMWare to serve your Notes client under WinXP without a problem. OK, if u wanna, move all 2 Puakma and MySQL :-)
Tell him to get down to an ASDA (Wallmart over there) electrical store where he'll be able to pick up a 15" portable TV with in built DVD player for ■129. Bob's ur Uncle.
IMHO just let him go buy it. For Desktop use, all TFTs up to 15" are produced to 1024x768, 17" and 18" to 1280x1024 and 19" and above to 1600x1200 pixels. Anything different from that are always expensive panels exclusively made for relatively few laptops. While both markets (laptops and TFTs) are massively growing, I don't see a chance of non-standard TFTs making their way into the low-cost laptop segment.
You should also keep in mind, that 1400x1050 on a 14.1" display results in a font and desktop object size which is definitely too small for many users (ask your dad ...). The same goes for the now so popular 17" TFTs. It's O.K. for me, but most people over 40 or 45 will disagree.
Probably not beeing a programmer, he will not benefit from the extra pixels nearly half as much as you do, using whatever recent IDE.
Anybody running greater than 800x600 on a 15 inch screen is going to regret it in a few years. Seriously, your eyes will NOT thank you for all those tiny pixels when you get older. Even when you aren't aware of it, you are probably straining your eyes (as if all the time we geeks spend camped in front of a monitor isn't bad enough for them).
In other words, he is going to be just FINE with 1024x768 on a 15 inch screen. IMNSHO...
agree with harkpabst_meliantrop ,
shame, but my dad still have a 800x600 ...
everytime I come to fix stuffs on his PC I switch it to 1024 but he can't stand it !
So, if not programer = 1024 is big enough.
(however it's a shame for people like us, I have a Compaq Presario, and it doesn't come with more than 1024 !)
Thanks guys. Guess you're right, 1024 is the way to go. Makes my life a little easier.
So, does this meant that, as web developers, we will never be afforded the luxury of designing sites for anything more than that res? There's a subject for a whole other blog....
Any corporate site I've developed has had to be developed for 800x600. What a bummer ...
As for Toshiba laptops, I think they are spectacular. I'm on my third and have loved 'em all.
-- Mike
I've just purchased a Sony Vaio and it is great. 15" (1024) with CD-RW & DVD-RW combined, 2.4 Ghz, 40GB, 512MB RAM all for ■1032. I don't usually watch DVD's on it but they play with no problem. Looks better if you are a couple of feet away though!!
Only bad thing is the battery charger. Its HUGE!
I'm surprised that Mike has had no problems with Tosh's. We are always having battery troubles with these machines at work.
If your friend wants a decent machine, I'd take a look at a Vaio. Its quite *sexy* too!!
At work, I used an Acer portable with a 17inc screen. It's not the type of machine you'd carry with you on a regular basis (mostly between home and work for me) - but it allows me to have 1280 resolution at about the same size as 1024 on a 15.
Works well for the .Net stuff, and other developments.
Rob, anyone who can't deal with 1024x768 on either a 15" panel or a 17" reasonably flat modern CRT (which are close enough in display size as to make no difference between them, and which are bog standard displays these days) has a vision problem. Whether they are aware of the problem or not is another matter entirely.
I have had the great good fortune of having execrable eyesight all of my life, which means that I cannot do without rather powerful corrective lenses. Many's the time an optometrist or ophthalmologist has tried to prescribe me lenses that correct my vision to "normal", and I have come to realise that "normal" is, in fact, "half blind". I can say with confidence that the greater part of the lensless world could use correction of up to a full diopter (+ or -). That people are not aware of their lack of acuity is astounding to me. Do they not know that distant trees have branches, just like the kind you can see up close?
With regards to resolutions for web pages - we're using a JavaScript based web reporting tool, so we get resolution information from all our IE users (97%+).
Looking at August (our last full month) 45.67% of page views (out of 100,000) were at 1024x768, 44.58 at 800x600. Other resolutions account for the rest most with a couple of hundred views each. The 1024x768 users seem to be slowly creeping up over time, I suppose this is because new PCs that are being sold today are set to run at 1024x768 and most people aren't going to change it.
Note that this is for a personal insurance web site, so the users are mainly "real people" - I'm sure a technical site like Codestore would get more users running at higher resolutions. Also most likely the technical users running at higher resolutions are using non-IE browsers which don't report screen resolution :)
Anyway, as far as a public website is concerned - you still have to cater for 800x600 for the foreseeable future.
I totally agree with Stan, that 1024x768 px (NB: I refuse to call this a "resolution", although we all got used to it. The resolution actually is the number of pixels divided by the width (or height) of the screen, usually given in ppi. Done with my geeky action of the day. ;) ) is the sweet spot for (desktop) 15" TFTs. And we should also make it clear one more time, that the visible surface of a 15" TFT is almost equal to that of a typical 17" CRT.
Nevertheless we have to accept the fact, that this is at least partly a matter of personal taste. As I grew up with the famous ATARI SM124 monitor, I always preferred a higher resolution (more pixels per inch) over a lower one, as long as the picture is crisp and clear. But I've also seen people happily (and intentionfully) running 800x600 px on 17" CRTs. Inconvenient and ugly, if you ask me, but well, they didn't.
What ever your friend buys dont get a Compaq. Worst build quality I have ever come across. Had a Dell before it got stolen which was far better.
You can't go wrong with a Dell Latitude in my book. I've a C840 that I paid a little extra for to get a SXGA (or something like that) screen. It's a 17" screen but it can do 1600x1200 and you can still read without squinting! However, if you're mate's (hope that apostrophe!) on a fairly low budget and he doesn't NEED a large screen, then a laptop with a 15" screen will be perfectly OK in my eyes...and it'll be all the more portable.
Jake - Just thought I'd say absolutely wicked website mate. I've been a 'reader' for some while but only a week or 2 ago I realised there were a lot of blogs that I hadn't read from '02...Probably cos I changed jobs into an area that didn't require domino development...Anyway to cut a long story short, I've been spending the last few evenings completely re-reading all your blogs and getting myself back up to scratch (so when I hit a few busted links and it mails you...that was probably me ;).
Keep up the good work m8.
OMG, Just re-read my post from the 18th and I was horrified to see that I'd not only concentrated so much on the apostrophe on "mate's" that I inadvertantly types "you're" rather than your....
Ashamed,
J.
Toshiba laptops... my department has used them for years without problems, but the last batch of Satellite Pros for our 80-strong sales force are ticking time bombs. On some (10+ and counting) the motherboard fails, and on others (5+ and counting) the hard disk fails. The VP had 4 new Satellite Pros before we gave in and got him a Dell. All our new laptops are now Dells. Maybe we just got a bad batch, but I wouldn't recommend them to anyone.
The max resolution (on my ticking Toshiba) is too high. It's a great screen, but I knock it down to 1024x768 because the text is just too small at native res, so it's wasted money.
I just bought my first laptop in 4 years - Dell Inspiron 600m. I'm having a problem adapting to the SXGA display. (I guess my eyes prefer TFT.) The letters are fuzzy, not-crisp, and closer to gray than black. But I understand this is normal. Do most people actually prefer XGA displays?
I'm thinking of buying an nx9500 HP Compaq.
It has a 17" screen and native res at 1440 by 900 I think.
I'm wondering whether I should get the nx9500 or a Dell Inspiron XPS which has a 15.4 WUXGA screen. I don't know the native res for that, but a Sony A170 that I tried was the clearest LCD I've ever seen in my life.
I work with a lot of tables and think the wide screen will help me... the wider the better. I'm leery of high resolution for bragging rights.
I buy and sell laptops for a living. By far the highest quality laptop I have come across is an IBM. When you take them apart you can tell how well they are made. Probably accounts for why they are so expensive.