Saturday, June 03, 2006

New computer

I bought a Dell Inspiron(tm) notebook.

It came with a lot of crap I neither need nor want, so I took some time removing stuff.

The hardest thing to get used to is the display. I was using 800x600 on my old computer.

This one is 1680x1050. It's kind of strange.

I like it a lot.

Later,

3 people have spouted off:

dave said...

Yeah the resolution on a laptop can be a strage beast. Most times if you try to change it it makes the whole desktop a little box inside of a huge black border. This is especially bothersome when it's an older laptop and you want to take the resolution down to make the damn thing faster.

phil said...

The best thing to do is run at the native resolution as much as possible - it's not possible when playing old games through dosbox - or it is possible, but requires scaling which can slow things down.

Man, I hate all that crap that comes pre-installed on a computer. The best thing to do is get a regular Windows install CD, format the harddrive and install windows and only windows from scratch - then install all the stuff you need (like the drivers for the laptop's hardware which probably aren't on the windows cd).

Of course, this is assuming that you want to use windows at all - I don't. I'm using ubuntu linux - it's great. There are a few annoyances - like the way they play nice with the mpaa/riaa and don't give you the stuff necessary to rip movies/music. That stuff isn't hard to install though - with a little research.

1680x1050 is better than my laptop (1280x800) but looks like it's also a widescreen format - that messes up some software which expects you to be running a standard 4:3 aspect ratio. If you're using mplayer, you gotta add a line to your mplayer.conf like this:
monitoraspect = 16:9
Then when you fullscreen a movie, it doesn't get all distorted and stuff.

John said...
yeah, it's wxga.
6/6/06, 8:24 PM