My new Dell I9300 is here!!! I'm stoked! Question inside...

[cooldrum3]

It came on Monday and I finally got all the crap Dell installs off and all my stuff on. Pretty standard specs: 1.73 M, 512 MB RAM, 60 GB 7200 RPM, a/b/g w/ bluetooth, WUXGA with TrueLife, 8x DVD/RW, an extra battery (close to 8 hours!), and the backpack.

I just have to say, this thing is SWEET! I bought it as a replacement to my main desktop system, so I loaded it up pretty well. I love the integrated subwoofer, which is a vast sound improvement over the tinny little speakers in my old 2650. Also this widescreen at 1900x1200 is incredible. My only gripe is the graphics resizing in IE, they look like crap. Anyone know how to rectify this problem? P.S.- I don't mind having everything small. I just blow the text up.

Any other tips that anyone might have regarding this CHOICE piece of kit, I'd love to hear them.

[Elif Tymes]

Tis very very nice :) Did you get the 6800? And I'm assuming you got 2x9 Cell batteries?

I advise downloading and installing Centrino Hardware Control. This will provide you with voltage options to allow you to run your processor at lower volts. Thus decreasing temperatures and increasing battery life.

[cooldrum3]

Yep, the 9 cells. I didn't splurge for the extra video and only went with the X300. Should be plenty though for my needs. I wanted to keep the price under 1500 total. (I had a $750 e-coupon that paid for the upgrades I did take.)

P.S.- I figured out the graphics resizing problem. It wasn't the widescreen like I thought, just the high resolution. "Larger fonts" was selected in the display properties. Once I changed that and rebooted, IE displays properly :).

[Elif Tymes]

Yea, I had an X300 for a while, it runs all the new games, but at lower resolution. Unfortuantely, with the 1900*1200 monitor, your gonna have a hard time with games, they'll get stretched out nasty on the widescreen, unless you can force them to run in the same aspect ratio.

[cooldrum3]

Yea, I had an X300 for a while, it runs all the new games, but at lower resolution. Unfortuantely, with the 1900*1200 monitor, your gonna have a hard time with games, they'll get stretched out nasty on the widescreen, unless you can force them to run in the same aspect ratio.

I was reading the widescreen gaming sticky post. It shouldn't be too bad, and I don't mind the black bars thing so much. I've been watching widescreen divx movies with black bars for some time :). I find the increased productivity from the larger hi-res screen outweighs it.

[Elif Tymes]

Well, on a 1900*1200, lets say your running Black and White 2.

My 64MB X300 ran B&W2 at 800*600. THat's not a problem with a screen that has a mere 1440*900 resolution. With a 1900*1200, your going to see a serious amount of black bars. More than half your screen will be black width wise, and exactly half will be black height wise.

Anyways, you'll get used to it :). What you may want to do is see if you can force the game to run in a 6:5(I think that's the aspect ratio) resolution.... You'd propably have to do some driver tweaks to enable that resolution as an actual option for your graphics card to display...