INNNterestink! Laptop settings.
INteresting!
I’ve been wanting a new large laptop….
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I’ve been wanting a new large laptop. I have my teeny tiny Fujitsu P1120 which I still think is the A # 1 single best thing since sliced bread would do biz with again highly recommend A+++++!. But it’s tiny and not-so-fast, so it’s just for on the road around town really.
But for my main computer, I’m off PC’s and am laptop-only at this point.
When we had our apartment, we made the big bedroom our computer room and the small bedroom the bedroom. So when we moved into our new house (2 story, 4 bedrooms), we made the second biggest room the computer room.
But what happened is that, unlike the apartment, sitting in the computer room is isolating. It’s upstairs, far from the fridge, the tv, the significant other, the cat, etc., and during the day, the upstairs rooms get HOT! (southern exposure, no trees, Florida!)
So when we moved in, we got in the habit of just using our laptops downstairs, and that just stuck. And now, I just don’t see the point in PCs at all when laptops can have huge screens and lots of power.
So anyway, we go to Midnight Madness at CompUSA tonight just for shits and giggles. I see laptops, lots of laptops. The ones w/ the best screens are more of course. (Frankly I HATE this new trend of SHINY laptop screens. HELLO!?!? GLARE?!?!?) I’d like a 17″ screened laptop, but right now I just want something newer than my current big laptop (a 5 year old Gateway which shorts out every battery or floppy drive you put in, and has no feet left).
After many circles around the laptop department, I determine that some laptops just don’t go BRIGHT enough, and yet others the text looks like SHIT. Too bad, cuz they’re such GREAT DEALS, those blurry laptops.
So we go next door to Barnes and Noble to have lattes and play with “Ike”, my Fujitsu P1120 which I take w/ me almost everywhere I go cuz it’s SO small and light. M starts playing with the Control Panel, like he was doing in Comp USA with the showroom floor laptops, and discovers that there is a setting that makes text look like SHIT.
We being to wonder if maybe, JUST MAYBE, CompUSA deliberately sets the BARGAIN laptops so that the screen looks blurry, to make you buy a pricier laptop (which I almost did).
In XP if you go to Control Panel, then Display, then Appearance, then Effects…
…if “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:” IS checked AND the associated drop-down box is set to Clear Type, it actually makes screen text SHITTIER.
But if you uncheck that box OR set the drop-down to Standard, the screen is crisper.
So we finish our lattes and go back to ComUSA. Sure enough, the bargain laptops are ALL set to “clear type” and upon changing the setting to Standard or just totally unchecking the box altogether, the screen clears up! MEANWHILE, every single EXPENSIVE laptop, is already set to Standard or unchecked!
I seriously doubt this is a coincidence!!!
Even good ol’ tech-savvy me almost paid alot more for a laptop just because I THOUGHT the cheaper laptop had a fuzzy screen. How many others fall for this I wonder!?
Hmmm!
In the end, I did get a new laptop, but I got the cheapest one there (but made sure that the screen was quite bright on it’s brightest setting, cuz some even more expensive ones just don’t get bright enough). This was one of the ones that we thought had a blurry screen, but upon adjusting the setting as above, it has a very crisp screen (and bright). I got a Toshiba Satellite M35X-S149 and will throw some extra ram in it next month. Tonight Amazon wants $999.99 for it, and I paid $599 after rebates, which will go in the mail tomorrow.
It’s no speed-demon video-editing power laptop, but it sure will be better than my 1999 (?) 600mhz/128ram laptop. Maybe at tax refund time I can get a 17″ power laptop, but I doubt I’ll even need it.