Question about using an external monitor on a laptop

[assemblage]

My parents are replacing their old laptop and are asking me for advice. Dad is willing to spend about $1k on a notebook that will be used for their general web surfing, email, and viewing photos of grandkids that family is sending around. They don't need a long battery life because it will never be too far from an outlet.

I suggest they get one of these new cheap Celeron M laptops. Circuit City has one on sale this week for $600 after rebate -> 1.4ghz Celeron M; 512mb ram; Intel Extreme Graphics 2; 60gb hd I think; built in b/g wireless. I think it would satisfy their needs without having to spend 1-1.5k for something with a P-M, better monitor and better video chipset. My thought is, the speed and storage in that notebook computer is all they need for a while.

Since they are in their 60's and use glasses and reading glasses, I think a large LCD monitor would be very beneficial to their enjoyment of the notebook computer. That makes me think of the 17" display laptop that dell has. But that's $1.5k. The Pentium laptop they are replacing sits on a small desk in the kitchen and remains there 95% of the time. I figure they are better off getting an external LCD monitor and the $600 laptop. They could hook up a desktop mouse and keyboard too and use the laptop like a small footprint desktop and still be able to take it on trips the 5% of the time they do that.

As monitor sizes get larger, then it becomes easier to see larger resolutions. So if they splurge and get a 21" LCD monitor and want to use 1280x1024 and higher resolutions on that external monitor can they do that even though the laptop's monitor only supports 1024x768? The Intel Extreme Grapics 2 chipset says it supports "350 MHz DAC for 1800x1440 @ 85Hz max CRT resolution or 2048x1536@60Hz max FP resolution".

Thanks!

 

[cy7878]

pretty sure it will not be a problem.

 

[kandtech]

Just a thought - with larger laptop screen comes greater resolution, but not larger text/icons. I've tried the "large text" options in Windows on my in-laws, and they did not like it. In addition, the other option (lowering the resolution) also does not yield good display quality.

I know you've asked about a laptop, but the best solution my in-laws was a desktop with a 19" monitor, set to a lower resolution (than you would normally with a 19" monitor).

 

[omissible]

LCDs don't switch resolutions the way CRTs do. They have fixed pixel sizes, and setting them to a lower resolutions makes them look horrible as the display tries to double some pixels and split others. (unless you use exactly half the resolution, so that it just doubles every pixel.)

A 21" LCD will probably have a resolution of 1600 x 1200.

I'd try to find a laptop with a 14" or 15" 1024x768 display. You can probably still find them, and it'd have nice fat pixels. Or just get a CRT, and use whatever resolution you want.

 

[RonS]

Look at the Dell 9200 with their lowest resolution (1440x900). It probably offers one of the biggest pixel sizes for a top-end topbook.

As far as external displays, the Dell 1901FP is a really nice flap-panel monitor with a native resolution of 1280x1024

What you really want to do is maximize the pixel size on a display. Compute the number of pixels from the top left corner to the bottom right corner and divide by the distance. Assuming that the pixels are square (this is pretty much always true), the formula for computing the pixel size is sqrt(res1*res1 + res2*res2) / inches.

For example, on the Dell Inspiron 9200, you would get 1698.12 / 17 = 99.89 pixels per inch. Those as pretty big pixels and very easy on the eyes. On my Thinkpad T42p, it's 132.5 pixels per inch, which is pretty small.

On the Dell Inspiron 8600 with their ultra-high resolution display, it's 147 pixels per inch. That's too much resolution for some people.

The Dell 1901FP monitor I mentioned above has just 86 pixels per inch, which is VERY easy on the eyes.