20070819 widescreen madness why i wont be buying a laptop this year - plembo/onemoretech GitHub Wiki

title: widescreen madness: why i won’t be buying a laptop this year link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2007/08/19/widescreen-madness-why-i-wont-be-buying-a-laptop-this-year/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 662 created: 2007/08/19 14:41:00 created_gmt: 2007/08/19 14:41:00 comment_status: open post_name: widescreen-madness-why-i-wont-be-buying-a-laptop-this-year status: publish post_type: post

widescreen madness: why i won’t be buying a laptop this year

Here’s the deal. I’m a sysadmin. I use my laptop for sysadmin work. I rarely watch movies on it, and when I do I almost never watch them full screen.

Widescreen displays may be better for multimedia PC’s, but for business, and especially tech, work they’re not only unnecessary but can really be annoying. With a widescreen when I do an ls -l or tail a logfile I get nearly 1/2 as many lines before I’ve got to go backscrolling in the display. Thanks, but no thanks, to that. Oh, and all you webmasters out there who’ve worked so hard at making each of your pages take up only a single screen: time to get back to work.

Of course what this is really about is laptop manufacturers pulling a fast one on consumers. LCD’s are expensive to make. By going to a wide screen format, they can still claim the screen is the same diagonal size while actually delivering fewer square inches in screen real estate. That’s less for the consumer and more to the bottom line.

Anyway, widescreens just don’t work for me, and since all the major laptop manufacturers now offer nothing else in their reasonably prices models, I won’t be buying a laptop this year.

That’s around $600 - $800 of revenue Dell, HP, Toshiba, et. al. won’t be getting from ‘ol eldapo this year. Sorry guys. You’re busted.

P.S. For those of you out there who run Linux, one of the quick fixes for issues with getting widescreens to work on our favorite O/S is to configure X-Windows to do 1280×800 resolution, which for some of us is something of a step down from the 1280×1024 we usually run at. Nothing like “widescreen performance”!