Dell Inspiron 9300 Review - Page 2

first of all thank you for this PERFECT thread

that battery life is awesome comparable to 9100 well this has an centrino cpu that's normal

pictures were great

i don't know why dell ships its notebooks with default hynix RAMs

Yeah, I didn't notice any "sparkle" effect. Also, the Toshiba and HP screens looked better than my Viewsonic PS790 19" CRT!!! IMHO

I see you're playing WoW - thats why I'm currently upgrading from my 1.67 Powerbook to the 9300, so I can ramp up the level of detail in WoW.

How does it play ay 1900 x 1200?

I like the boxes piled high and the person with the camera behind the fishies on the toshiba pic.

The reflections

Yeah, that's yours truely taking pictures with a Canon S400 with the boxes in the background. I think it adds to the screensaver, don't you?

But to comment on that reflection, I didn't even notice the reflections until I looked at the photos back on my PC (and I looked at that screen for a while!). But, the glossy screens do have reflections, but they seemed to only be a pain if the light was angled just right.

All i get for part number on my invoice is this "320-4256"

You are not going to see it on a screenshot...only in person, and it's most noticable when running text or white backgrounds at the native WUXGA resolutions.

-Scotty

Ic ... that sparkle thing, is it really that bad?

If you plan on playing at that high of a resolution with WoW, then you'll need to tone down some of the details....perhaps the ULTRA on the XPS 2 will handle it better...I found that running it at 1440x900 (WXGA res on the WUXGA screen) was the sweet spot.....great framerates...HIGH detail settings, and it looks sharp

-Scotty

I tried the linux/knoppix CD on this and it came up with "unknown manufacturer" for the LCD...

-Scotty

Well, I suppose that could be a good sign -- at least it's not the same as the 9200.

Did your box have a packing slip (not the invoice)? If so, there should be a part number for the LCD.

Edit: I posted some step-by-step instructions for determining LCD here:
http://notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=69266

I have that at work, i'll look at it tomorrow and let you guys know

-Scotty

Thanx for the pics, Asdasl.
I, like everyone else, have made more than one trips to show rooms to check out machines, except to compare side by side, touch and feel a Dell......
One thing that really annoyed me was that most of the Sony 17" WUXGA are always playing the "low-res" Intel promo, which does no justice to its true power. I only saw one Sony with a Vaio desktop background, which yeilds a tremendous detail with great clarity, truly breath taking. In addition, that machine just froze there, couldn't do anything with it. Well, this is New York City, display models are always beat up like crap.

Correct me if I am wrong. I don't believe Sony makes their own LCD for laptops. Can anyone confirm that? And where does Sony get them from?

I am also waiting for my 9300. Just hoping/wishing the screen will look beautiful, at least Dell has a greater "inner beauty", as we all know.

Robustness?

Hi all!


I'm thinking of ordering a 9300 with the 17" WUXGA screen (all specced out, just need to finalise payment!) ... I was hoping someone who has played with one in person might be able to answer a concern I have about how strong the panel is.

I've seen some widescreens that warp quite significantly if you move them from one corner ... how good/bad are the Dell screens? Do they have a metal frame in the lid or are they all plastic? Does it look strong enough to survive daily commutes in a backpack on a bicycle for instance? (I'm not so concerned about the weight - my current laptop is a 4 year old all-magnesium "ultralight" but with all the other junk I need to carry with it, it's almost 3 kilos already!)


On a separate note, the "sparkle" people keep talking about ... I'm trying to picture what you're talking about ... does it look like what you'd expect if you had a grating in front of the screen with a grid spacing (spatial frequency) that "beat" against the spacing of the sub-pixels (3 sub-pixels in each pixel, one of each color) of the panel? (I'm not talking about things actually moving here of course!). If so, I've seen similar things when I applied a textured screen protector (generally sold only for mono screen PDAs) onto the color screen of a PDA (basically the textured surface acted as tiny lenses that caused different colors to come out more or less so depending on your viewing angle - hence the holographic effect).

Not that this leads to a solution of course, but more a possible cause (uneven adhesive application, microscopic stressmarks in the coating, etc.) ... just a thought ...

- Psinewave

WUXGA+ Not too small....

On my 9300 I ordered the WUXGA+ screen (glossy 1900x1200). I then read that it was hard to read things with such a high resolution. I measured out the actual size of the 17" LCD to be about 14.6"x9.1". This is slightly bigger in width and a little smaller (by about 1.5") in height as my 19" CRT. So, I cranked up the resolution to 1600x1200 (not quite 1900, but the highest it'll go). Without changing fonts, I found I could read it just fine. After turning the font size to 125 DPI, there was no question it was easily as readable as when I had it in the lower resolution (1280x1024). If it's STILL too small, you can custom size the fonts. Make them bigger! Just my 2 cents.

For those of you who want to see the "sparkle" effect...i tried to get a good camera shot of it....see below:

You can see it on the picture Shboyles? Maybe circle where you can see it? Or is it all over?

We need a chat system that we can quickly jump to from a thread.

I'm trying to get an even better shot...

Scotty, have you actually tested the battery life?
The numbers in the review looks like they are for the x300 version...

I would really like to know the actual battery life when doing "normal" work...