After much debate and little time or inclination to research (read: December schedules FTL) I’ll just ask you guys and gals for suggestions.
I’m looking for two items: my first widescreen LCD monitor, and a new laptop.
LCD: I don’t think my current desk would allow anything larger than a 22″ which is fine, I’ve seen the bigger ones and, if it were an HDTV being viewed from 5′ or more, that’d be one thing. But sitting right at the desk with the monitor that close, the big ones hurt my eyes and give me headaches. A friend recommended the Samsung 226BW which sounds great other than people complaining about the lack of height adjustment on the stand. A 2ms refresh time is a must — I am a gamer after all. Now, here’s another potential issue with that 226BW: the “recommended” resolution of 1680×1050. My normal desktop runs at 1280×1024 and that’s good enough. It’ll do better, no problem, but that’s also my preferred gaming resolution. COD4 is killing my system and I had to break down and reduce to 1024×768 to get (in my opinion) playable frame rates. I’m told that running a resolution other than the recommended tends to result in blurry or otherwise not-so-crisp images so if that’s the case, the 226BW is out of the question. There’s no way I’d be able to run COD4 at 1680×1050 if I wasn’t overly pleased at 1280×1024. Enlighten me on how these resolutions work on LCD’s as my only experience has been my Dell 600m that I’m desperately looking to replace. Which brings me to item #2…
Laptop: Obviously, given my profession, I travel constantly so portability is a huge issue. I’ll define portability into three categories: weight, size, and battery life. Widescreen would be great, but I’m looking for 13.3″ maximum. If I’m in the cabin of a plane those big screens are also tall and they won’t open quite enough to watch movies comfortably, especially if the person in front of me reclines their seat. Big also means more weight, and I have plenty enough weight to lug around with my luggage and flight bag. Again, I’m a gamer and I’d like to be able to play the occasional game when I have time. Nothing super serious like Vanguard, although if it will run Vanguard, great. If it’ll handle LOTRO with ease, that’s probably good enough for me currently. Basically that means a good video card and 2GB RAM. Battery life is an issue for all laptops, but this 600m gets ridiculous. I’ll turn the screen brightness down as low as I can while still being able to read well, running as few applications as possible, and I still only get 1.5 hours out of it tops. The majority of movies in the past 10+ years are regularly hitting the 2 hour mark. I obviously won’t be gaming on batteries. As for OS’ it seems most come with Vista. I have an XP Home sitting around unused, and I’ll likely be dual-booting with either Ubuntu or PCLinuxOS so quite frankly if the laptop comes without an OS that’s fine by me.
Thanks everyone, I look forward to any assistance you’re willing to give.
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