It seems like there ought to be a web site somewhere that has specs on "all" the available laptops and would let you filter by their specs. But I can't find it. Am I stupid? In particular, the specs I'm interested in are screen resolution and physical dimensions, including weight.

Is this helpfull?

http://www.hardware.info/en-US/productdb/bGNkbJg/grouppage/Notebooks/

Edit: Or this dutch site? Schermresolutie=resolution, Gewicht=weight

http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/cat/496

The first one doesn't allow me to search by resolution or weight. The second one is pretty close, except it includes laptops that are not currently available. Thanks.

This is where being a platform or brand zealot helps narrow down the choices right up front.

Part of the reason I want this is that I'm totally amazed that laptop resolutions are relatively lower now than they were like 5 years ago. Yeah, they're all widescreeny, but who the fuck cares about that? Okay, people who watch a lot of movies on their computers, but what about business users?

Case in point: My office is full of IBM ThinkPad T4x laptops. They have 14.1" 1400x1050 screens and weigh under five pounds. In order to get a screen of the same height, you now have to get a 15.4" screen, which increases the size of the laptop dramatically, and I don't think you can find one that weighs less than almost six pounds.

And, yes, (at least) for business use, height is the important screen dimension. If you're coding, you want to fit more lines on the screen, not make the lines longer. If you're working with a word processor, you want as much of the (almost always) portrait-oriented page on screen as possible. There's nothing inherently wrong with making the screen wider, but it makes laptops bigger and heavier, while either reducing the height or, at best, leaving it the same.

Also, having docking stations be a requirement helps narrow things down quite a bit, too. There are only four vendors I'm aware of that provide them, and one of them is Sony, and if I wanted the kind of support I would get from Sony, I'd just buy a different brand and then dial random digits on the phone. In fact, I'd probably be better off. I figure there's a greater chance of a randomly dialed person being able to help with my issue than there is of a Sony "support" person being able to. Heck, a "this number is not in service" recording probably would be more help.

(The others being Dell, Lenovo, and HP/Compaq, BTW. Let me know if you're aware of others.)

It sounds like you want a notebook with a rotating screen.

The argument for wide screens is that you can lay up multiple (though smaller-looking and higher density) pages.

I'm not sure you're going to find something new to fit your ideals. Which is why you're looking for that nice table comparison. You're going to have to come to some decision to balance the physical screen dimensions, weight and pixel density just for starters.

Personally, I don't have a problem with the higher resolution screen options offered by Apple as an example. The increased density means additional clarity for smaller type sizes as long as your vision isn't lacking. The physical sizes of the screens are acceptable. Weight is about the only issue, but I think I'd pretty much always want lighter, regardless of how light the product already was.

Connection to an external display can solve your dimension/resolution problem with or without a dock, depending on the graphics capability of the computer. Macbook Pros can output dual-link resolutions in portrait or landscape for instance. I'm not sure how many other brands offer rotation (or accelerated rotation like the Macs) built-in.

I was only semi-joking about the zealot comment, but I can't seriously consider any notebook products from any company other than Apple at this time. There's just nothing out there with even close to the same build quality.

I'm still blown away to see VGA connectors on almost every new notebook by the clone makers. VGA!? Redonculous.

Rotation was available in ATI, Intel and nVidia drivers for pretty much everything that I've used. As for whether its accelerated I've no idea as I've not used it.

Heh.. until one goes to a conference and then observes the daily panic as presenters suddenly realize their precious notebooks won't accept the industry standard projector cabling (15-pin D-Sub).

Sure there are dongles available, but oddly enough they seem to get forgotten/lost by those presenters quite frequently.

I just find it amusing. My own main notebook has both VGA and DVI-D duallink on the back.

Cheers

One of the classrooms in which I teach has both a VGA and a DVI cable. I plugged my MacBook Air into the DVI and, after three minutes of fidgeting, gave up and switched back to VGA. For better or for worse, VGA is the standard, and it does the job.

Sorry, it took me a second or two to figure out what your complaint was here. I'm assuming that the first laptop you mention is a 4:3 display, and the second [hypothetical] laptop is a widescreen 16:10 display?

If that's the case, I understand what you're saying, but I can also see an opposite way of thinking: mainly that you can make a widescreen laptop just as wide as the 4:3, and it'll be lighter because it's shorter. I know this was an appeal in the last office I was in because it meant that the attorneys who flew quite a bit would be able to more easily use a widescreen laptop on a tray table if the person in front of them leaned back.

Anyway, I remember Dell offering screen choices on a couple of their models**, but I think your best bet is going to be Lenovo. I'm not certain about their consumer sales, but at least in their business side you could pretty much customize the heck out of their laptops, which included screen resolutions.

*edit*

**Looks like the XPS M1530 offers a choice of 15" widescreens: 1280x800 or 1440x900.

Wow, my experience with in-depth testing of all things VGA and DVI has been the opposite. That DVI for the most part just works and VGA has been hit or miss, mostly because of the displays, not the computers/firmware. Generally problems with going to resolutions not supported by the display and then getting no image or broken image. Every DVI device I've ever tested has always had a proper EDID so the computer always knew which modes to select.

The only thing I can possibly suspect with regards to the Macbook Air is a fault in the firmware of the ultra-crappy integrated Intel GFX.

DVI is also passe but will stick around for some time. Display Port is where it's at now.

Yeah, sorry. The T4x laptops are 14.1" 1400x1050.

Let's assume your scenario, that I'm interested in 1400 pixel width and would like it smaller. In order to get the closest equivalent, I have to go with 1440x900, which is available, at its smallest, in a 15.4" screen. (Correct me if you can find a smaller screen with a similar resolution. Please. I want to know about it.)

Using some basic trigonometry (and assuming the pixels are square), you can discover that the dimensions of those screens are 11.28"x8.46" and 13.06"x8.16". So it actually is shorter. That said, with the T41p and T61 I have at my desk, while the actual LCD panel is shorter, the lid is exactly the same height. Why? Because they can't (or won't) reduce the depth of the main body where the keyboard is, and the lid has to have the same dimension.

But the DPI is significantly lower with the widescreen one: 110DPI vs 124DPI. There are also almost 12% fewer pixels.

Factor into this the extra weight that the widescreen laptops inevitably seem to have (I don't know what to blame this on), and it's just not worth it.

Not to be picky, but I'm only aware of one option, on the 17" MBP, which frankly should be the default on a 17" screen. I'm still hoping for a 1920x1200 15" MBP screen, but figure I'll have to do it myself if I actually want one before snow leopard.


If it's gotta be a PC, buy Lenovo. Their low end models are now low end, but their midline and high end lines are still better than any other PC laptop maker.

Matthew

No docking station, no business use.

Apple really needs to wake up on this front.

I'm using a PowerBook with a 1280x864 screen right now, so all of Apple's MacBook Pro models are higher resolution options. When I wrote that I thought they had both a 1440 and 1680 resolution option for the 15" model.

1920 on a the 17" model may be too high for some people. Remember that you generally can't adjust most font sizes in Mac OS interfaces. In fact I only know of adjusting the icon label font size.

I'd like my next notebook to be a 17" MacBook, but I'm already worried about the UI issues it may bring at 1920. I've been waiting some 5 years for them to add controls to the OS for this. Windows, for the most part, has had much more detailed user-level font control since at least Windows 95. But Windows sux, etc. etc..

Yup. In a similar fashion to Bitt, I'd like a laptop with a high resolution screen that doesn't weigh a lot. All of the laptops with a high resolution screen are all boat anchor style desktop replacement systems.

My old Dell Inspiron 9000 boat anchor style laptop had a 15" 1600x1200 LCD and it was actually pretty nice in terms of resolution. That LCD + a light system would be great for me. The majority of my work is actually done on a server anyway and I don't need the rest of it to be blazing fast and incredibly heavy.

The new Dell Latitude E6500 has gotten very good reviews for its build quality, and it has a higher resolution screen, is slightly lighter, has a more featureful docking station (specifically, 2 DVI ports instead of 1 DVI plus 1 VGA), and is (very slightly: about $50) cheaper than the equivalent T61.

I'm taking a chance and getting some of them in. I've not been wildly impressed with the Lenovo T61s I got in. Nothing wrong with them, but not as good as the IBMs.

I've never had any problems with VGA. It just works. If the display doesn't get detected then you just set whatever the maximum is.

You don't have to worry about HDCP and whether its single or dual link. You can hot swap VGA with no problems just by moving the cable. Once you start getting things that use HDCP then you need to reset things or get a HDCP compliant switch box.

When you hot-swap a VGA cable you generally won't have a visible display if you switch to a monitor that can't handle the resolution you were just outputting to the previous monitor. Unless things have changed in this respect, hot-swapping only worked perfectly (resolution didn't matter) with digital connections, at least on ATI Mac hardware. I can't speak for the Windows drivers and firmware.

The rest, HDCP and single/dual link aren't concerns for most people out there. Dual link only matters if you're trying to drive a dual-link display. HDCP is only going to matter when you're playing back protected content on a platform that implements the protection.

VGA also doesn't look as good and for me that's more than a little big important. Every Mac can output to VGA from its DVI-I connector with a dongle if necessary. I'm assuming any clone notebooks offering only a DVI port offer the same capabilities, no?

I like to have at least one system around with legacy ports, but I don't want a notebook with a serial port nor parallel port on it either. I wouldn't mind it if Apple would have kept the S-Video port on their notebooks though, since it allowed using two external displays and turning off the built-in. Now you're limited to using the notebook's own display if you want to connect to an NTSC/PAL monitor at the same time.

I've never tried plugging a device that was outputing a higher resolution DVI signal than the display device could accept. It is the display device that does the "magic" in this case though.


HDCP seems to get automatically enabled if it can do it. I've not worked out how you can change it in either OSX or Windows.


True. On my desktop I use DVI. The issues with my hotplugging are mainly from occasionally unplugging the desktop and plugging in my PS3.


Nope. Some are DVI-D only.


I'd actually like to have a serial port and parallel port still. I'm not bothered about the S-Video port at all. Total opposite of you

Lots of embedded devices still use a serial port for various reasons. I could use a USB dongle but its just a hassle to have to remember to lug that around and it doesn't always work properly either.

I've got plenty of device programmers and other odd devices that require a real parallel port and not the USB printer port dongles.

You can get honest-to-god UART-based PC Card serial ports, which, I've been told, work pretty consistently. Not that that solves the "lugging it around" problem. Or the "laptops won't have PC Card slots much longer" problem.

There are probably equivalent parallel port PC Cards, too.

I use my old desktop for the devices that need a proper UART serial port and real parallel port. Thankfully the things I need to use with my laptop all work okay (so far) with a USB to serial dongle.

My VAIO actually has a CardBus slot and a ExpressCard 34 slot which is a bit odd. Sony bundle a combo memory card reader for the ExpressCard slot. The first time I saw it I thought eh? Sony have some bizarre custom slot just to fit in a card reader device? Sony being Sony, the laptop actually has a built in MemoryStick slot in the side as well. It would have been easier and nicer to just have the combo reader built in...

ExpressCard doesn't help because most ExpressCard devices are actually USB based ones. Not seen many that use the PCI Express part of it yet.

I just did a quick search and found some that are PCIe.

I guess I've never considered the Air to be a netbook. I suppose it's technically an extremely high-end netbook (small, light, no optical disc reader, SSD), but it's so ridiculously far out of the price range of the average [or even the next most expensive] netbook that in my mind it's silly to even include it in the same category.

Personally, I'm hoping to get a Dell Inspiron Mini 9. When the deal was going on, I should have asked if anyone here was interested in getting the Studio 15 laptop. $99 was an incredible offer for the Mini 9.

Mmm.. Judging from the hotest new products out there, HDMI is where it's really at.

Cheers

HDMI is just DVI-D plus audio.

Ah, don't worry about the offer. It only applied to 'full price' Studio 15 laptops which were $250 more than what anyone normally pays anyway.

I ordered a Mini 9 for my sister a short while back and should be here in a week or so. Quite looking forward to playing with it, looks pretty neat.

Back to the original topic...

I agree that there should be the equivalent of DPReview.com for laptops.

Laptopreview.com is nothing like dpreview.com.

Maybe we should band together and start one.

Work gave me a laptop to replace my desktop during my last refresh cycle. The only port I really miss on it is the Line In. No more empeg at work for me until I get around to getting the digital audio card installed

Or you buy the docking station.

(Well, at least *my* docking station came with a line-in port. And an extra power supply, too. So it was a nice thing that I had work get me the docking station.)

I have the docking station, well the D/Port Advanced Port Replicator. I'm guessing it is the same thing. The only connections on it are the AC Adapter, Modem, Ethernet, S-Video Out, DVI, VGA, Parallel Port, Serial, S/P DIF, 5 USB ports and headphones. I looked high and low for the Line In.

Aw, that's too bad they didn't include a line-in on the dock. I guess they figured S/PDIF was the New Hotness.

Looking at the wikipedia entry for Laptops, I came across http://www.notebookreview.com/
in the External Links section.

Does that help?
There are a couple other links that might be worth checking into as well.

I saw that Engadget post too, but that was a pretty weird deal. Actually, when the Mini 9 deal was first announced, it wasn't like that scam that it ended up being. You could add the $99 Mini to the $649 Studio 15. You just needed the right link, which actually still worked until two days after the deal officially ended Unfortunately I wasn't able to find anyone to go in on it with

I'll be very interested in your impressions of it. My current laptop has just died (I believe it's beyond repair), and I'm really interested in the Mini.

Ooo. I like that one.

I'd found that one already. The search options are near worthless:

No resolution search.

A search for graphics chip manufacturer? Who gives a crap?

A search for manufacturer? If I knew that, I'd just go to their web site.

Processor type but no speed?

Weight and screen size are reasonable, other than the common problem of only being able to select one option at a time. (Looking for a screen under fifteen inches? That's six different searches.)

(Note that I'm not complaining that manufacturer and graphics chip searches are available, only that they should have been much lower priority than some other, more basic specs.)

Do they keep track of how many stickers come on each of the laptops?

Yeah. They need search options for a laptop with built-in air ionizer or anti-bacterial keyboards.

The ability to search by graphics chipset manufacturer is important if you want a gaming laptop. If your brand new laptop comes with an Intel XtremeCrap graphics chipset then you're not going to be doing much gaming...

It's also handy to know if your graphics chip is defective.

Well, simply selecting Lenovo yields 398 items, so I guess that's one reason. And Lenovo's own site is horrible.

I guess it'd help as well for when you're getting a laptop from places like Dell that give you different options depending on what part of the site you use.

Sound like what you need to do is reorder the wiring and have the laptop line out plugged into the empeg and tie the line outs of the empeg to your pc's external speaker system.

Well, time to take it easier on that site, Bitt. After about 1 minute and 5 clicks with that search engine, I ended up with a strong possibility.

Have you taken a look at the Lenovo T400? It has a 1440x900 14.1" display (if you choose the WXGA+ when building).

Does that look like it could pass muster?

Throwing it back off topic...

I use my titanic-sized Inspiron laptop at work as a desktop replacement. Given that it spends 90% of it's time tethered to the wall. What's the best way to ensure the battery doesn't fade or get cooked?

Take it out of the laptop with 40% charge or so and just top it up every so often.

Resolution's too low....

And about the search: how far did you have to go to find a resolution? Dig down into the review? What about ones that don't have reviews? Go to the manufacturer's site? Given that there are over 600 laptops that have 14-15" screens, that's a lot of digging.

As an aside, the only current laptop I can find that meets the specs I set out above is the Panasonic Toughbook Y7. The drawbacks are that there isn't a docking station for it, and, oh, that it costs about three times as much as it should, ignoring the "tough" part of it.

????

I'm confused...you said to find you something with a similar resolution (1440x900 in your post) with smaller than 15.4" screen. Just saying, that's what I did

And I narrowed it down by picking a random manufacturer (Lenovo), a small screen size (14-14.9"), and then worked up from the lightest weight until I got some results. That left me with about six models and the first one I clicked on was a 14.1" with 1440x900 resolution.

Given that you probably don't want to consider every brand on the market (there are some crappy ones after all), you might try this method, going from brand to brand. It narrows it down somewhat...

Fair enough. I did. But I actually need it to be at least as ... resolute(?) ... as the four year old laptops we're currently using. And as I pointed out in that same post, 1440x900 has a significantly lower DPI and a significantly lower number of pixels.

1440 in a 14" display is something above 100dpi. I generally consider that pretty good resolution for an LCD.

I think you're basically looking for a WSXGA+ screen in something less than 15". In that case I believe your earlier assessment might be correct: they don't make them. I don't think the market for them is great enough. Too many average consumers would see it in the big box store and think the text on the screen was too small.

It's also possible that they simply don't make WSXGA+ panels that small. You're really starting to cram a lot of pixels tightly together.

I think Newegg is a good place to see what's available. They appear to list a good number of laptops (232), and let you narrow your search by screen resolution. The resolution you want is only available on 15.4" notebooks.

Yeah, NewEgg's search is excellent, but it (for obvious reasons) doesn't list any laptops other than ones available via retail channels. So that pretty much means no (at least higher-end) Dells, Lenovos, etc.

Honestly, what I'd really like is "SXGA+" in a screen less than 15". But, virtually no one makes non-widescreen laptops any more.