XPS2 First Thoughts

Hi,  

     Graphics are better but the 3.4 extreme edition in the XPS first gen,:smileyhappy: kicks its axx.

Both Machines are great, but I much prefer raw hourse power over battery life.

 

SliceN

Vancouver Canada

I've had my Inspiron XPS Gen 2 for about one  week.  Overall, I've been  very impressed  with  overall quality and performance.   Given the speed of this machine, I was particularly impressed by how quiet and cool it runs.  MS Flight Simulator 2004 runs great even with various effects set to max (cloud complexity, traffic density, ground texture, etc).  Since the Gen 2 has a wide aspect display, you'll probably want  to select "Fixed aspect ratio scaling" using  the nVidia display properties page.  Otherwise the flight instruments and  scenery will appear stretched horizontally.   This  is a common problem for games like FS 2004 which are designed for 4:3 aspect ratio displays (such as 1024 x 768).  The downside is that you will have to live with narrow black vertical strips on  either side of the active display (no big deal for me).

 

The only negative that I have so far is the fuzzy or blurry appearance  of text on some web pages displayed in the Internet Explorer browser window.   Dell sets the default font size to 120 dpi to avoid having very small text characters on the 17-inch screen.  This is a well-documented issue (see the video forum) that has  been noted on other Dell notebooks with very high resolution displays.  The problem can be minimized  by going to 96 dpi font size or by changing the "UseHR" registry setting to "0".  I don't believe this is a Dell-specific issue - rather it's a Internet Explorer rendering  issue that is likely seen on any notebook that employs 120 dpi font size on 1920 x 1200 hi-res screens.