Re: [gentoo-user] OT: advice sought on new laptop for Gentoo

[Alan McKinnon]

Apparently, though unproven, at 14:58 on Sunday 05 September 2010, John Blinka 
did opine thusly:

> Hi, all,
>
> My trusty Inspiron 8200 is on death's door and so I'm looking for a
> new laptop - one that will run Gentoo straightforwardly, of course.
>
> I really liked the 1600x1200 display on this machine, which I greatly
> prefer to the 1600x900 display on the more modern Inspiron 1545 I own.
>  Most of what I do now is through a web browser, and I can see much
> more of a web page with 1200 lines of display than I can with 900.
> And I dislike the massive width of the 1545 which makes it much less
> portable than the old 8200.  I'd love to replace my 8200 with a
> machine of similar dimensions, but thinner and lighter.  However, I
> cannot find any machine on Dell's website with a 4x3 aspect ratio -
> they all seem to be approximately 16x9 now.
>
> So,  is 16x9 all that's available now in laptops?
>
> If I'm stuck with a 16x9 aspect ratio, then I'd like to get something
> significantly narrower and more portable than my 1545 (14.75", 37.5 cm
> wide) and with as many horizontal lines in the display as possible.
>
> Any suggestions?
>
> (And, yes, I'm open to a non-Dell solution.)


I seem to have deleted the mail you sent me direct :-( It was the one where 
you mentioned you'd been to dell.com and couldn't find something 1200 pixels 
high.

I see now what Dell have done - they change their model lineup periodically. 
My XPS M1530 seems to be replaced with the Studio 15. I have multimedia keys 
and speakers to the rear of the keyboard, this makes the notebook deeper by 
just over 1 inch and gives room for a gigantic extended battery. Screen size 
is determined by the height x depth so they made the pixels slightly non-
square and there's room for 1200 of them. True 16:9 is more like 1920x1080 and 
they've done that on the Studios to suit the HDMI native aspect ratio. Makes 
sense for a machine that will play multimedia a lot, I suppose.

That M1530 is an excellent notebox btw. Our techies can choose whatever they 
want within limits, I know 6 chaps that have them and none failed or gave any 
trouble whatsoever. Our devs hammer their notebooks :-)

The Inspiron is the cheapie and student range. I didn't bother looking there.

Of the Latitudes only the E6510 seems to have 1920x1080 screens - probably a 
side effect of the model re-arranging.


-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com