Re: [gentoo-user] new notebook

[Alan McKinnon]

On Wednesday 20 July 2011 07:30:11 Mick did opine thusly:
> On Tuesday 19 Jul 2011 21:47:38 Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > Notebook renewal time has rolled around again, I've had the old
> > one for 3 years now. Amazing how much can change in 3 years. I
> > don't do notebook support so my knowledge is always out of
> > date...
> >
> > I'm tending towards a Dell Precision M4600 partly because I've
> > had 4 Dells in a row all troublefree but mostly because the
> > company discount is a big number that can only be properly
> > described as "obscenely big"
> >
> > I'd like to get some input from folks who might have used this
> > hardware.
> >
> > Screens; a choice between
> > 1920x1080 WLED
> > 1920x1080 RGBLED IPS
> >
> > The IPS screen only comes with an NVIDIA Quadro 2000M with 2GB
> > GDDR3, The regular screen comes with these choices of video
> > card:
> >
> > AMD FirePro M5950 Mobility Pro with 1GB GDDR5 dedicated memory
> > NVIDIA Quadro 1000M with 2GB GDDR3 dedicated memory
> > NVIDIA Quadro 2000M with 2GB GDDR3 dedicated memory
> >
> > The price difference is substantial. Considering that my usage
> > is
> > nothing more stressful than KDE eye-candy and mplayer, is the
> > IPS
> > screen worth the extra price? OTOH the machine has VGA, HDMI and
> > DisplayPort as well as internal screen and I believe the ATI can
> > drive all 4 at the same time whereas the nVidia is "pick any
> > two". Up to 4 screens might be more useful than outright
> > performance.
>
> I don't think it is.  When I bought my XPS (a year and a half ago)
> the RGBLED screen was c. £150 on top of what was a rather expensive
> machine by my affordability standards.
>
> Perhaps it was an early version back then, but although it was
> claimed by those who bought it that the RGBLED has somewhat
> superior picture quality, it also had 2 more drawbacks besides the
> price:

I *can* see a difference with the RGBLED screen (see why answer to 
Stroller where someone in the office got one today), but its not a 
compelling difference and not big enough to make me go Wow! yet

> 1. You need to calibrate the monitor to get best picture and may
> need to repeat that every now and then.

I will likely never do this :-)
Mostly coz I'm lazy...

> 2. It will suck your battery dry (much?) faster than the WLED.
>
> If you're always on mains then the latter may be less of a problem.

Mostly on mains, but I'd like to stay at more than 2 hours battery 
life from a full charge for 2.5 years

> A word of warning:  the 1920x1080 resolution on a 16" monitor is
> *small*. Trying to read a typical website or even the content of my
> desktop menu would cause eye strain!  Ha!  Fantastic picture if you
> just want to watch videos in full 1080p HD, but if you are also
> thinking of productivity you may need to readjust your desktop
> settings to make reading comfortable.  On e17 I had to change the
> Scaling setting to 80 DPI.

Currently I have 1920x1200, 96dpi and konsole fonts set at 8pt. I'm 
used to people looking over my shoulder saying "how the blazes do you 
read those tiny letters?"

> A final note about Dell's build quality:  This is meant to be a top
> of the range laptop.  However, there are no substantial rubber
> stops to keep the screen surface away from the keyboard.  Even with
> 3 additional self-adhesive rubber stops that I added, the keyboard
> is still touching and scratching the screen.  For the sort of money
> I paid to buy it I would expect some more thought to have gone into
> the design and build of it.  I guess all laptops these days are
> being churned out of some Chinese sweat shop, but for the money I
> expect a better product.

I can't honestly fault this XPS's build quality. The palm rest area 
has warped, but it does run hot almost 24/7. The keyboard always felt 
a tad lower quality than it should have been, but did take 2.5 years 
for the legends to start wearing through.

From what I've seen, the Precisions are better (there's quite a lot in 
the office of varying ages). They are almost as good as ThinkPads - 
not as good, but close.

-- 
alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com