**9300** DISPLAY Questions..........

I went with the WUXGA. I have read that it will use other resolutions with minimal blurring, and I can aways use the WXGA resolution if I choose to do so. Plus with video editting and Photoshop CS it will be worth while to have this resolution. Frankly, either way you go, WXGA or WUXGA it seems the screen is getting high marks...

I believe a DVD is 720 x 480.

WUXGA is glossy, WXGA+ is not. I went with the WXGA+ screen because I don't care for the glossy screens at all, nor do I care for really tiny fonts. Also, for movies, WXGA+ is double the resolution given here for most DVD movies.

Also didn't hurt that WXGA+ was less expensive.

I opted for the WXGA+ too. I don't want glossy because it'll be used outdoors a lot and the text would be too small for me.
My 9300 is expected to be here Monday! What a long weekend it'll be.
My fingers are crossed for my screen choice.

Did you look at the specs on Dell's site? Only the WUXGA is TrueLife = glossy.

I don't think anybody has actually received one yet, but all of the literature suggests that only the WUXGA is glossy. Information from Dell CSRs is absolutely worthless, unfortunately.

The higher resolution will yield a sharper more details picture. It also yields more desktop space with regard to text based screens. If your eyesight it good, you can put 2 full page documents side by side and read them. Technically you can do this with lower resolutions if the display programs have zoom capability, but because of the lower resolution, the text will appear grainy. This grainy causes me eye strain.

I've got direct sunlight coming into my window right now. I have two large LCDs on my desk with anti-glare coatings, and I'm able to use both of them fine.

I fired up my 700m, and the glossy display basically becomes a mirror with this much direct light, but I'm still able to see the display fine if I can avoid shifting my focus to the reflection of my pretty face.

You must be on the west coast. I've got direct darkness shining on my cell wall.

Hi guys,
Just ordered the I9300 for $1297(was short of budget) and I ordered the 40 gig hard drive. I was wondering whats the speed of the 40 gig? 4200 or 5400?
And also i ordered 512 ram because i dont plan to run multiple applications, beside games such as HL2. Will 1 gig make a "HUGE" difference in FPS??
P.S.- specs are 1.6 ghz, 512@533 mhz, 256 geforce 6800.

You hit the nail on the head – the resolution is quite high for a 17” LCD if you are using applications that deal with text. The 1920 * 1200 pixels make normal text quite small – especially if you are using an external keyboard (and are thus further away from the LCD). The industry standard for a 17 inch LCD (not wide screen) is only 1280 * 1024 pixels. Therefore in comparison the text on a WUXGA screen will be tiny.

Changing the windows font size (via QuickSet or through Windows) does nothing for text within an application – it only affects windows components i.e. menus, tool bars, etc. Granted you can tweak some applications to make the default text larger, but not all applications work this way and some of them that do require the adjustment each time you launch the application (which becomes tedious).

You can adjust the Windows DPI setting, which is the only way to really make a universal change to all fonts across all applications – however this has a somewhat serious drawback in that Windows does not fully support any DPI other than the Windows default of 96. You can set it higher but you will start to notice that some applications and web pages render their screens incorrectly due to scaling issues with the higher DPI setting.

My current laptop has a resolution of 1920 * 1200 and I had to set its DPI to 144 to make the text look its best. Most things look great, but I do come across web pages and applications that don’t render quite right. It has to do with the Windows GDI not supporting scaling properly when you use a DPI other than the default 96 DPI value.

Note that DELL ships the WUXGA and WSXGA+ screens with a DPI setting of 120. While this makes the text more readable you will eventually start noticing that some applications and web pages not render their screens correctly.

Microsoft has acknowledged this limitation with Windows 2000 and XP. They claim it will be addressed in Longhorn. However Longhorn won’t be out for some time – so until then everyone should be aware of this issue before buying a very high resolution display.

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb;EN-US;Q820286

I have an i9300 on order and it is the WXGA+.

144 is insane...really...my screen is a 15.4" WUXGA set at 120DPI @ the 1920x1200 rez and I can see all text fine...the distortion of webpages and applications does happen occasionally, but not enough to be annoying...I guess if you have bad eyes and no glasses, the font would still be pretty small, and I've never had a 17" WUXGA so I can't comment directly; however, I ordered the larger screen and assume I will be very pleased with it. I too am a little concerned about the 'glossy' effect, which I've never seen before, but I just can't imagine that Dell would ship anything but a top-end monitor with such a high-powered box...?

what wxga should NOT be glossy. Then why we paying extra 100bucks for true life

It's called HL2 at at least 1280X1024 which is a nice sweet spot. With WXGA it is NOT an option. Also if I want to size it down I can. I cannot size it up though. All in all there is no right answer but I like to play games like UT2004 in ALL of their glory which this lappy most definitely can do. So there ya go...

I like the WUXGA @ 96 dpi. I've always looked for monitors with really high resolution. ... dunno, when the fonts are @ 120, it just looks "off" to me.

Yes, higher res(uxga) screens having more pixels require more
gpu power at there native resolution than the lower pixel count(xga+)screens

On an xps2 there is lots of gpu power to run "most" games at the (uxga) screen's native resolution,

but on the 9300 with the uxga screen theres not as much gpu horsepower
so you may have to play at lower res than native(not ideal because this involves streching pixels)

That was the main reason why I opted for the xga+ on the 9300 I ordered