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
