Don't make the mistake I made (new laptop)

[Giles Orr]

I just bought a Toshiba P850-057 - specs are a bit hard to come by as
this model is "exclusive" to Future Shop.  More on other configuration
challenges in email(s) to follow.

My mistake was in assuming that because it had a good Nvidia card
(GeForce GT 630M) with 2GB of RAM that driving my Dell U3011 at its
full resolution of 2560x1600 wouldn't be a problem.  Because, after
all, HDMI 1.4 supports 3840x2160.  But.  In looking at documentation
(after I made the purchase) for various P850 type laptops with varying
Nvidia cards, the max resolution out through the HDMI port is always
noted as being 1920x1200.  And that's all that appears to be supported
by Windows or Linux on this machine.

Looking at the HDMI specs, the max resolution of HDMI v1 is 1920x1200.
 Of course HDMI v1.3 is getting long in the tooth now and almost all
devices (claim to) support v1.4.  But I'm getting a bit of Bill Gates
syndrome here: "1920x1200 should be enough for anyone!"

Just a cautionary tale, with the usual punchline: "don't assume."  I
still think it was a reasonable assumption, but that requires the
manufacturers to be reasonable.

While the computer has two video outs (HDMI and VGA), it won't drive
two external monitors and the internal monitor at the same time.
However, it will drive two externals if the LVDS is turned off.
That's fairly nice.  And it's running a Samsung Syncmaster 2343 at its
full resolution of 2048x1152 over VGA while also running the Dell at
1920x1200.  And on this machine, Arandr is actually better behaved
than Windows' screen configuration utility.

Also on the plus side the laptop not only has four USB ports, but all
four are USB3.  And when I went looking for instructions on how to
change the hard drive, I found a video on YouTube - posted by Toshiba
Europe.  So Apple is welding its devices shut, and Toshiba is telling
you how to do it yourself.  I can get behind that - in fact, it was a
significant selling point.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists