Two e1505/6400 Questions

Greetings - Does anyone have any experience with the 15.4" WXGA+ glossy LCD from Dell? I think the resolution is 1440x900 but I'm not sure. My previous e1505 was WSXGA+ and that was just too much for the x1400 in my opinion, anyway. Second question - do the latest e1505's/6400's (with Vista Premium) come with an OS/driver CD or DVD? There is no option to get the media on the Dell site anymore. Thanks in advance...

 

I just purchased a e1505 with the WXGA+ (1440x900) running Windows Vista. So far the x1400 and WXGA+ screen seem to work well together. I too wanted the extra resolution but the WSXGA+ made the fonts too small for my wife on a 15.4" monitor. Screen looks great, and for me a perfect balance of size and resolution on the 15.4".

 

Thank-you grape8pe - Sorry to bother again - How is the LCD's brightness? I sold my XPS M170 last month because, although it had a very nice LCD, it wasn't very bright (like me!). Did yours come with an OS CD? Thanks...

 

The brightness is okay. For things to look good I have to have the LCD brightness bumped up all the way. I haven't tried using the laptop outside in the sun yet either. So far it's been adequate. Most of my usage will be indoors on the couch in front of the TV though.

 

I have the WXGA+ (1440x900) Truelife screen and I find it sucks for bright direct light on the screen. Meaning you can't see much unless you've got brightness cranked to max. I find the screen very clear and crisp in darker situations and can keep the brightness down a bit to save battery. If you are an outdoor person, a matte screen is the way to go. If indoors, like me, then truelife glossy should be fine. Looking at pictures/videos is really nice on this screen.

My 0.02 cents.

 

Thanks to both of you for your input - Dell 6400 - I responded to your partition sizing post before I saw your response to this one. Sorry - I'm an old guy...

 

This is more of a glossy vs Matte issue. I agree with others that glossy screen is terrible especially under bright light / sunlight at low brightness. On the other hand, my glossy XGA looks much better than my old presario's sxga indoors when running movies etc.. Brightness wise, I think they all have the same brightness unless you get stuck with a crappy brand screen with a bad brightness problem ...

 

Wella - Good point on the brightness - I didn't think about it until you mentioned it - there probably isn't much diff between the max brightness from XGA, WXGA+ and WSXGA+ (and you've been +'d - if it'll take my + anyway) I had a WXSGA+ on my previous e1505 with the x1400 - but only 1GB of RAM. I've seen in other posts that if you're running Vista then the system will allocate more than 128/128 for the x1400 - something like 128/256. Have you noticed that & how do you like the x1400?

 

Hi JellyGeo, the ATI X1400 has 128mb of dedicated graphics memory and takes up another 128 mb from system resources (ram). I think the x1400 is a decent middle range GPU. I didn't get the chance to fiddle around with games and what not but in terms of general vista performance etc. it's a great card. In fact it's the best GPU that ships with I6400/e1505 and is much better than the integrated GMA 950 card.

One a side not tho... one weird thing I noticed about x1400 and vista is that on the video card settings it states that "total available graphics memory = 895mb" and "shared system memory = 767mb" which makes wonder if the x1400 is actually taking up so much ram from my system when in reality it's supposed to take up just 128mb. I think it's more of a driver issue which will fix up later, or maybe I have a super powerful graphics card on my system with almost 1gb of graphics memory