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Dell M6300 Questions

post #1 of 11
12/26/07 at 12:57pm
Thread Starter 
Hello folks, gotta a few questions regarding a new M6300.

• It came with the 17 inch Wide Screen WUXGA TrueLife LCD

When I reduce the resolution to anything below its native setting everything looks blurry.
I have a program that does not respond to font size changes in windows. Any ideas how I can make the screen look sharp with lower resolutions?

I would have thought that trying LARGER than native resolutions would have caused the blur problem, not SMALLER resolutions... ???


• Back In the day I recall DELL producing modular bays which could take a battery OR a optical drive, maybe even a hard drive too...
When I ordered my system I thought it was capable of having two internal drives. I am dissapointed now that I realize it can't.

Is there a module for HD's that can be used with the M6300? I looked but could not find anything.



Thank you.
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post #2 of 11
12/26/07 at 8:02pm
Lower resolutions make things blurry because it takes up more pixels to product the same product, and also, the aspect ratio is off also.

There are no modular bays for the M6300 because it is not considered hot-swap removable.
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post #3 of 11
12/27/07 at 7:36am
Thread Starter 
Hmmm, I guess you are "stretching the pixels" I guess? That's why its blurry. But how come older video cards on computers with old screens from back in the day could deal with resolutions below the "native" resolution without making everything look blurry?


Think I may have found a product that fits.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...m=200182597687

There is a Dell (maybe foreign) which was produced as the Inspiron 9300. This chassis is seemingly the same as the M6300! I will let you know what happens.
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post #4 of 11
12/27/07 at 9:25am
First of all, congratulations, that’s an awesome laptop. Any kind of LCD has what is called a native resolution. Unlike the CRTs of old, LCDs have a physically fixed number of pixels on the screen. If you try to differ from that, the screen has to try and put two pixels in some places to fill in the extra space. A LCD will always look best at its native resolution. I have seen more recent LCDs do this pixel guessing rather well, however, I am surprised a new laptop like that looks bad. Make sure you are using resolutions that are also wide screen in nature when you step down. The only resolutions your panel will look OK with are – 1900x1200(native), 1650x1050, 1440x900, and 1366x768. Let me know if those still look bad. If you find the appearance unacceptable and you cannot get it right with all of the windows enlargement setting than you may want to think about finding someone with a similar laptop with a lower native resolution that wants to trade up. Possibly someone with the 1440x900 M6300 variant wished they had your screen.
As far as your hard drive issue, why do you want a second drive? If it is for additional storage your best options is probably to just upgrade your existing internal drive. Last time I checked the largest notebook drive available was 320GB and was street priced around $250. If you need a second drive for performance reasons, like needing a separate scratch disk for Photoshop or other multimedia application, your best bet is to get a SSD (solid state drive) for your express card slot. These are disks made from flash memory. They are very expensive but they have extremely low access times and I have never seen a regular hard disk that goes in the express card slot. The best price you can get on a 32GB SSD is probably in the upper 200’s. Hope this helps, Matt.

Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ BIS View Post
Hello folks, gotta a few questions regarding a new M6300.

• It came with the 17 inch Wide Screen WUXGA TrueLife LCD

When I reduce the resolution to anything below its native setting everything looks blurry.
I have a program that does not respond to font size changes in windows. Any ideas how I can make the screen look sharp with lower resolutions?

I would have thought that trying LARGER than native resolutions would have caused the blur problem, not SMALLER resolutions... ???


• Back In the day I recall DELL producing modular bays which could take a battery OR a optical drive, maybe even a hard drive too...
When I ordered my system I thought it was capable of having two internal drives. I am dissapointed now that I realize it can't.

Is there a module for HD's that can be used with the M6300? I looked but could not find anything.



Thank you.
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post #5 of 11
12/27/07 at 12:25pm
Having a second drive is great for image backups/restores and to hold a different operating system, and of course for redundancy should the main one fail

I dont use the same item as shown on the ebay auction, but I can confirm that the one I use in my M90 is the same one I also used in my 9300, fits in the DVD drive bay

You can also hot swap the drive, just go into device manager and toggle off the second ide channel on ide controllers, then enable it again after the swap

cheers
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post #6 of 11
12/27/07 at 2:13pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ BIS View Post
Any ideas how I can make the screen look sharp with lower resolutions?
You can increase your font resolution by going into the Advanced Display Settings, and increasing your DPI to something like 120, or even higher if you want/need it (default is 96DPI). This will render all of your fonts larger on the screen, while keeping everything nice and smooth at your native LCD resolution.

What you should never do is decrease your display resolution on a laptop LCD, as you have seen...
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post #7 of 11
12/27/07 at 2:50pm
forgot to say, my 2nd drive is pata for the adapter i have
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post #8 of 11
12/27/07 at 5:31pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by bobosoft
First of all, congratulations, that’s an awesome laptop.
Thanks! Yes it is. I am loving it.


Quote:
Originally Posted by bobosoft
Any kind of LCD has what is called a native resolution. Unlike the CRTs of old, LCDs have a physically fixed number of pixels on the screen. If you try to differ from that, the screen has to try and put two pixels in some places to fill in the extra space. A LCD will always look best at its native resolution. I have seen more recent LCDs do this pixel guessing rather well, however, I am surprised a new laptop like that looks bad.
I was surprised too. I mean, on a pinch there is nothing wrong with it. I can live with a little bit of blur. Its just a little annoying.


Quote:
Originally Posted by bobosoft
Make sure you are using resolutions that are also wide screen in nature when you step down. The only resolutions your panel will look OK with are – 1900x1200(native), 1650x1050, 1440x900, and 1366x768. Let me know if those still look bad. If you find the appearance unacceptable and you cannot get it right with all of the windows enlargement setting than you may want to think about finding someone with a similar laptop with a lower native resolution that wants to trade up.
It did not help, but its OK. The appearance is acceptable even with the blurring.


Quote:
Originally Posted by bobosoft
As far as your hard drive issue, why do you want a second drive? If it is for additional storage your best options is probably to just upgrade your existing internal drive. Last time I checked the largest notebook drive available was 320GB and was street priced around $250. If you need a second drive for performance reasons, like needing a separate scratch disk for Photoshop or other multimedia application, your best bet is to get a SSD (solid state drive) for your express card slot. These are disks made from flash memory. They are very expensive but they have extremely low access times and I have never seen a regular hard disk that goes in the express card slot. The best price you can get on a 32GB SSD is probably in the upper 200’s. Hope this helps, Matt.
Thanks Bob, yes, the second drive is for music. Basically I am doing live music performance with my laptop, however I have had enough with external drives and want to keep it all within the laptop. I picked up a new 320 SATA drive for the DELL already, and yesterday I found a guy in Shanghai that sells the proper swappable module for carrying another drive within the M6300 (or Inspiron 9300 that has the same chassis apparently).


Quote:
Originally Posted by ZX81
Having a second drive is great for image backups/restores and to hold a different operating system, and of course for redundancy should the main one fail

I dont use the same item as shown on the ebay auction, but I can confirm that the one I use in my M90 is the same one I also used in my 9300, fits in the DVD drive bay

You can also hot swap the drive, just go into device manager and toggle off the second ide channel on ide controllers, then enable it again after the swap
That's awesome ZX81!

So the device is not REALLY HOT HOT HOT Swappable, meaning I can just pull it out, eh? I have to disable it first... OK, I guess that's fine.


Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirx
You can increase your font resolution by going into the Advanced Display Settings, and increasing your DPI to something like 120, or even higher if you want/need it (default is 96DPI). This will render all of your fonts larger on the screen, while keeping everything nice and smooth at your native LCD resolution.

What you should never do is decrease your display resolution on a laptop LCD, as you have seen...
Yes, I tried to use Windows ability to make fonts larger, but the program I am using does not support this feature. It stays with the same size. The only option then is to change the actual screen resolution. Thank you Pirx!


Any other ideas are welcome.
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post #9 of 11
12/27/07 at 10:27pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by DJ BIS View Post
Yes, I tried to use Windows ability to make fonts larger, but the program I am using does not support this feature.
Now I am getting curious: What kind of a program is that? Clearly, if what you say is true, then your program does not use the Windows font subsystem at all, and instead does all of its font rendering by itself. I haven't seen anything like that in a long, long time, so I wonder what kind of an animal we are dealing with here. How many decades old is this program?

P.S.: And of course, if the above is the case, then there is nothing you can do about the font size, other than running at a lower resolution...
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post #10 of 11
12/28/07 at 7:37am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Pirx View Post
Now I am getting curious: What kind of a program is that? Clearly, if what you say is true, then your program does not use the Windows font subsystem at all, and instead does all of its font rendering by itself. I haven't seen anything like that in a long, long time, so I wonder what kind of an animal we are dealing with here. How many decades old is this program?

P.S.: And of course, if the above is the case, then there is nothing you can do about the font size, other than running at a lower resolution...
Haha, yeah, interesting, I know.

It's a specialty program for DJ's called Serato Scratch Live. It's actually the worldwide DJ industry standard right now. Developers are working on allowing font size changing from within the program...

Here's a quickie:


That's the interface.


That's the hardware that comes with it.


And that's how the hardware is hooked up.
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post #11 of 11
12/29/07 at 12:20am
Try using a program called PowerStrip to add and configure a resolution for your notebook. I used this before to get a sharper, lower than actual resolution out of notebooks. Most likely you can get a much better display than what the default lower resolutions are providing, even if you use it to reconfigure an already existing lower resolution, because there are actually a bunch of underlying LCD settings that go into configuring of how lower resolutions are mapped, besides just setting the resolution and PowerStrip will do a better job of this than the default driver configuration that comes from Dell. It may take a little experimentation, but I have had good success with PowerStrip with this sort of thing.

An alternate method, as someone else has probably mentioned, is to leave your resolution at the maximum, but to change the dpi to a larger size. This is quick and easy to do and will give you the optimal sharpness while making text larger. This is acceptable to most people, but in some cases certain things will not be in the perfect aspect ratio intended, such as web images or icons looking slightly squat. I know at some point Dell was sending out high resolution laptops with this preconfigured.
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