Today, we traveled to the fair city of Toledo, OH, to visit Dell Direct at the Franklin Park Mall. Dell Direct is not a store, but rather a kiosk. They had about six computers on display, including a Inspiron 8600 with the WUXGA screen.
When we arrived, the computer was turned off. I turned it on, but it was protected with a BIOS password. One of the sales reps came by and entered the password. Upon booting, there were four possible logins and the rep chose one of them.
I immediately noticed that the screen looked like crap. Images were distorted and everything was quite large. I attempted to access the display properties, but these were not enabled for the current account. I called the sales rep over and asked her to confirm that the computer did indeed have the WUXGA display. She checked a document and confirmed that the computer was so equipped. I then told her that the computer was misconfigured, but she said I was wrong. I made a stink, so she logged out of the customer account and logged into a more privileged account.
I checked the display properties and found they had the display set to 1024 x 768! What a bunch of incredibly stupid morons! They had their premier screen set up like the cheapest of the crappy notebooks. It is quite easy to imagine that these store fronts do a poor business since the people manning them obviously have no knowledge what-so-ever about the products they are hawking.
Once I had the display properly configured, I started poking around the program menu. I found a directory called nVidia demo. I launched one of the programs and this first thing it did was reset the resolution to 1024 x 768. The demo then proceeded to run very slowly, only several frames per second. Very underwhelming to say the least.
As a final note, 1920 x 1200 is just too many pixels for a 15.4” screen. Text was too small to be read comfortably. Setting the display to 1680 x 1050, which is clearly not going to be as sharp since it is not the native resolution, resulted in much more legible text.
When we arrived, the computer was turned off. I turned it on, but it was protected with a BIOS password. One of the sales reps came by and entered the password. Upon booting, there were four possible logins and the rep chose one of them.
I immediately noticed that the screen looked like crap. Images were distorted and everything was quite large. I attempted to access the display properties, but these were not enabled for the current account. I called the sales rep over and asked her to confirm that the computer did indeed have the WUXGA display. She checked a document and confirmed that the computer was so equipped. I then told her that the computer was misconfigured, but she said I was wrong. I made a stink, so she logged out of the customer account and logged into a more privileged account.
I checked the display properties and found they had the display set to 1024 x 768! What a bunch of incredibly stupid morons! They had their premier screen set up like the cheapest of the crappy notebooks. It is quite easy to imagine that these store fronts do a poor business since the people manning them obviously have no knowledge what-so-ever about the products they are hawking.
Once I had the display properly configured, I started poking around the program menu. I found a directory called nVidia demo. I launched one of the programs and this first thing it did was reset the resolution to 1024 x 768. The demo then proceeded to run very slowly, only several frames per second. Very underwhelming to say the least.
As a final note, 1920 x 1200 is just too many pixels for a 15.4” screen. Text was too small to be read comfortably. Setting the display to 1680 x 1050, which is clearly not going to be as sharp since it is not the native resolution, resulted in much more legible text.
