15.4 Widescreen Readability

Hi all,
I'm looking at a DV4000 for my wife (I have a Dell 9300). She likes the widescreen aspect of my laptop so that she can see two pages of a document side by side. But, she wants a smaller machine for herself. I went to a Best Buy to look at 15.4's in person to try typing on one to see if two pages side by side would be readable, HOWEVER, BB's "special" display software keeps anyone from actually typing on the floor models. They brought a tech guy over who rebooted the machines in Safe Mode but this locks out the native resolutions (boots to 800x600). At this resolution text is definitely illegible in a side by by zoom. They were unable to show me anything at a higher res. SO, do any of you do this type of text editing (side by side) on your 4000's?

 

Yeah, I don't like that stupid program they put either. Somebody on a Vaio forum had said there was a way to bypass that program. Oh well.

I find it quite easy to read text side by side on my DV4000. I don't think you'll have any trouble.

 

I have the 15.4 but on a different brand and i really like it. I think she will be happy with it.

 

Could consider something like the Asus Z71v which has a WSXGA higher resolution screen.

 

Wouldn't a higher resolution make it harder to read text?

 

While the higher res has the effect of making the text smaller, it makes it cleaner. My 9300 has very crisp clean text but it is pretty small at native resolution. The lower the resolution the "chunkier" the graphic, whether it be text or a pic.

 

I had Toshiba with 15.4" wide screen. Despite being 15.4" resolution is only 1280x800.
So, when you keep two documents side by side it give only 640 pixels for each doc, but that includes borders for both docs effectively reducing the size even more. So I think to use with side by side pages comfortably, you need 1600+ horizantal resolution.

 

I say WXGA is not enough for viewing side to side windows/documents. I have a desktop 17" LCD which is about the same width as a 15.4" widescreen and has a horizontal resolution of 1280 (same as horizontal res of WXGA). With my desktop, I can never comfortably use two windows at the same time. There is always some overlap and plenty of switching between windows cutting off something that I needed to read. The WSXGA+ 15.4" screen on my Z70Va makes side-by-side windows so much more useful.

 

Argh, a couple for and a couple against...I looked at the Asus, but it doesn't look like it has the "glossy" screen which she really likes too.