I'm considering getting Sian a laptop for her birthday (probably be a joint present as she's not bought anything for my birthday yet :( ) and had a quick look at some refurbished ones last night. Quite a few Dell 630s out there for under £200. Any ideas what they are like?

 

Would it be worth spending a bit more (hopoefully not lots more) on a new one which I assume have better screens and multitouch trackpads (I /hate/ trackpads). I'll have to check Sian is happy having a second hand laptop first. The websites say they will show signs of use but I suppose it's just luck how much it's worn.

 

Also I feel like playing Frontier. Used to love that game.

These are pretty good, maybe.

(nod)

:O over ten times what I want to spend. And ten times more rubbish than what I want to buy ;)

:D

personally I'd love one, but since I already have a perfectly good 13" MBP there's even less way I could possibly justify £2000 than if I didn't.

If someone gave me one I'd put it to good use. Like holding the kitchen door open when the front and back doors are open. Or for a little extra height when I can't reach something just out of grasp. Or maybe as a support for when I'm drilling holes into wood. The metal might blunt the drills on that last one though.

Nah, it's only aluminium, and quite thin at that. Dunno how much use it'd be for reaching something, it's not very thick. You'd be better off standing on a normal PC keyboard.

I'd love to be able to justify a 15" retina one, shame there's no 13" retina/high res model.

 

I'd obviously stick Win 7 on it, but they look niiiiice

Yes. And the 15" one has more pixels than my 27" monitor :&

Ummm, if you're buying it for Sian, surely the important question is whether she likes trackpads, not you, you self-centred buffoon. No wonder she's not bought you anything for your birthday.

Isn't that like getting 400 fps in video games?

Um, not in the slightest. I can quite easily tell the difference between 220ppi and 110ppi. Have you actually looked at a retina display?

 

If they subsequently increased the res to 440ppi then yes, the difference would be barely noticeable and more akin to getting 200fps.

 

 

Well if it was for me I'd take the trackpad out and replace it with a block of cheese. Or maybe a pair of boobs. Although some laptops already come with nipples. I did find the multitouch scrolling pretty useful on my mother in law's laptop recently. Still prefer a mouse though.

 

I'd forgotten how bloody annoying the combat is in Frontier :(

 

And eBay looks like it could be a decent place to get a second hand laptop if I'm lucky. I shall keep an eye out.

I read something yesterday that said the maximum selectable resolution on the new macs is lower than the screen res so probably some scaling going on.

 

I should have been asleep ours ago.

I love the trackpad on my MBA, it's large and responsive, but hate the one on the cheap-as-chips Lenovo at work, it's small and shitty. So I guess the answer is it depends on the trackpad, init?

Well yes, I'd imagine using the screen at native res would be somewhat impractical – yer average 16 pixel icon would be 1.8mm high if my early-morning maths is correct.

That doesn't sound right. Anything lower than native would look awful unless it was a multiple of the native. I really hope that's not true.

They assumed the res (something x 1440?) was being doubled then scaled down. Some games allowed the full Res to be used with teeny tiny console text.

It's 2880x1800, so double the usual 1440x900.

Yes, I think that's the standard "res" that it uses. What I'd read was that even at higher resolutions 1680 x 1050 or 1920 x 1200 the image is rendered at twice the size then downscaled to 2880x1800.

I'm sure some are better than others, I've just never used one that I've liked using.