WSXGA or WXGA in 15.4 inch widescreen...HELP!

Hi,

I have purchased the following machine...

Asus F3JM-18P INtel Centrino Core 2 Duo 7200( 2.0Ghz, 667Mhz, 4MB Cache)
15.4" WSXGA (1680x1050 native)
2 GB's DDR-II 667Mhz
120GB 5400RPM HDD (I will get a 100GB 7200 RPM later if I feel the need)
Nvidia Geforce Go 7600 512MB
DVD Dual Burner
Wifi 802.11a/b/g
10/100/1000 LAN
Bluetooth
CMOS Webcam
Win XP-PRO

It is basically this machine

http://www.notebookreview.com/default.asp?newsID=3164

With Core 2 Duo CPU, WSXGA screen and 7600 Go 512MB

There is still time to change the order - I have until Tuesday morning. Maybe even Wednesday.

I will mainly be doing web development, sys admin stuff in windows - eg using RDP, using excel, word, surfing, blogging, Outlook 2003 etc, Skype/web conferencing.

Some gaming - LAN and by myself - FPS's like HL2 engine and some others, latest RTS games like JTF, Company of Heroes. All are equally important.

Will I be happy with the WSXGA screen or would I have been better with the same machine but the WXGA screen....?

My thoughts were that this machine gives me the ultimate mix between portability and power and screen resolution but now I am thinking the WSXGA might be too small for ordinary text blah blah - yes I know I can increase the size of text in browsers and word etc etc.

ANyone with WSXGA in a 15.4 inch widescreen that can comment?

I currently use 1920x1200 24 inch widescreen Dell 2405FPW and 1600x1200 Dell 2001FP dual on my desktop and it's perfect. The notebook will be a "secondary" machine to the desktop but it's still important I get it right.

All thoughts and opinions gratefully received.

 

Well it all depends on your eyes. I'd rather have the extra space for displaying additional consoles, documentation, or a browser with the rendered page. My eyes don't have any problems with that dpi. My friend is an EE and runs a 15.4" with 1920x1200, and again, his eyes can take it. So go look at a screen with equivalent dpi and see if it bothers you.

As for games, you might end up interpolating down. It's kind of a personal preference thing if interpolation bothers you or not. You know what interpolation is like so you already know the answer to this one.

 

A friend of mine got a WSXGA display due to a model change when he was wanting a WXGA. He found it somewhat hard to read because his eyes are somewhat old. Some applications include some sort of zoom function, but others don't. So we looked to reduce the display resolution.

Strangely, the ATI graphics driver does not support lower resolution modes at a 16:10 aspect ratio but we found salvation in the Omega driver, which supports many more resolutions including 1280 x 1800, 1360 x 850 and 1440 x 900. My friend appears to have settled down with 1440 x 900.

While LCDs always look best when used at their hardware resolution, reasonable results can be obtained at lower resolution with font smoothing enabled. However, at WXGA I find font smoothing reduces contrast, but at WSXGA the result is much more accceptable.

Hope this helps,

John

 

The WSXGA screen is better - it has better clarity. You can increase increase dpi in windows to make everything bigger, but for the same font size, the WSXGA will look "clearer" than WXGA, simply because it has more granularity.
Windows is a bit retarded - it looks at WSXGA and says "ooooh, higher resolution, lemme make the fonts small". You should see the screeen in linux, SXGA on a **14** screen is GORGEOUS. Even better on a 15 screen.

 

I'm one of those "old eyes" guys. The 1440x900 res on my rig looks really great but doesn't tax my ocular abilities. I think a higher res would really make things too small. From your avatar, you appear to be a youngster so you shouldn't have that problem.