HEY S-Series Owners

Question for ya...

I currently have a V505 that I'm thinking about selling to go with the S260 that is for sale at Best Buy for $1,750. However, with an aspect ratio that is different than what I'm used to, I was just wondering a couple of things:

1. When you play games, do you have space on the sides where there is no game? For example, on a regular aspect ratio like my V505, the entire screen is taken up by the game. I was just wondering with a wider screen, if there is unused screen or how that works.

2. A concern I have is with something that was written in another thread somewhere. Someone earlier wrote "To see the benefits for any text based work you really do need a higher resolution than whats on the S series, but thats the trade off for the size." I intend to do A LOT of writing on this laptop so I'm concerned with this. I don't understand, wouldn't I be getting a higher resolution with the S series than my V505? Just a little confused here!

Any other thoughts or suggestions you have for someone who is thinking of buying the S260 would be appreciated!

 

Oh, one other question...

With the standard battery that comes with the S260, what have you found to be the REAL WORLD battery life? For those of you who have the extended battery, is it bulky and does it stick out a good bit? One of the big reasons of going with the S260 is for portability, so I don't want to bulk things up if that's what the extended battery does.

 

1. The ATI display driver allows you to expand the 4:3 aspect ratio to 16:10 and fill the screen. You won't notice much of a difference as far as the things in the screen become "fatter". You could keep the 4:3 ratio and leave the black bar to the sides.

2. That's just a general statement. When resolution goes up, the size of font goes smaller and you can put more fonts -- an therefore larger portion of the portrait-shape paper of any text-based applications -- in a screen. This statement is true regardless it's a wide screen laptop or not.

For a wide screen laptop, you have higher resolution horizontally but not vertically, so you don't bring direct advantage for text-based applications. On the other hand, as I said, you can put toolbars vertically to the sides and actually get some space taken by toolbars back and get more vertical room.

3. I got about 3 hrs for my S170, with Sony's Presentation setting but actually writing. Never got the exact time because I never has the chance to be away from the plug more than 3 hrs.

 

1. http://www.widescreengaming.com/

2. (...) Someone earlier wrote "To see the benefits for any text based work you really do need a higher resolution than whats on the S series, but thats the trade off for the size." I intend to do A LOT of writing on this laptop so I'm concerned with this.

I don't think that you'll need a high resolution for writing. The only "text based work" that really benefits from a high resolution is programming: It is useful to have several windows with different parts of the code directly on the screen. But on the other hand too high resolutions on too small screens are pretty bad for the eyes, fonts on the B-Series with 1400x1024 on a 14" screen are pretty hard to read, for example. 1280x768 is okay.

 

When I bought my S260 for the first time I charged it up and after a couple days of using it, I had a 4 hour trip back home. I put the notebook in the ultimate powersaving mode so everything is using as little power as needed. I connected to my bluetooth phone via GPRS and I stayed connected for a little over 4 hours before the notebook had to hibernate. I gather a brighter LCD setting would take an hour off my time but leave the processor at battery life mode for internet stuff. I didn't notice any lag in that mode too. Hope that helps.

--Trevor--

 

Rovert - is that 4hrs with the standard battery or the extended one?

 

<blockquote id='quote'> quote:<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'>Originally posted by theorangeman
A concern I have is with something that was written in another thread somewhere. Someone earlier wrote "To see the benefits for any text based work you really do need a higher resolution than whats on the S series, but thats the trade off for the size." I intend to do A LOT of writing on this laptop so I'm concerned with this. I don't understand, wouldn't I be getting a higher resolution with the S series than my V505? Just a little confused here!

<hr height='1' noshade id='quote'></font id='quote'></blockquote id='quote'>

I was talking about being able to put two projects side by side.Its something that you can do with say, this webpage useing WUXGA or WSXGA , but with the s series' WXGA there is a scroll bar at the bottom of the page because the average page is more than 640 pixils.Its not a bad thing, just something that WXGA cant do as well as a higher resolution.

Viao S170B14