RedBeard’s Curious Life

After having the previously mentioned 17″ LCD for a week or so, I decided that my CRT was no good for me anymore, and decided to splurge on a second LCD. This time I wanted something even more splendid though, so I sprung for the Dell 2001fp.

Well, the 2001fp arrived today. I drove home with a smile on my face in anticipation of its splendor, and I was not at all disappointed after getting it assembled and connected. I tell no lie when I say that this monitor is simply flawless – a marvel of modern engineering. Every pixel is crisp and delightful to behold. It effortlessly handles non-standard resolutions with either a 1:1 pixel mapping or an aspect-preserving scale operation, a capability that I find sorely missing on the ViewSonic. The integrated USB port is nothing short of brilliance, and the PIP support is mere icing on a decadent cake of bliss.

I am quite seriously considering a return of the ViewSonic so that I may purchase a second 2001fp and use it instead, but being the che- uh, frugal person I am, I’ll probably keep the ViewSonic as a secondary monitor. I might get a new video card, since my current one sports only a single DVI connector and is somewhat crippled when faced with the task of rendering the vast quantity of pixels on these new monitors. However, all the hot new video cards are of the PCI-Express persuasion, which would require a new motherboard, and with new motherboards come new CPUs, and that’s when things start to get very expensive…

Oh, I got a new hard drive too, as I’m constantly fighting with the capacity of my existing storage. 300GB of SATA goodness should tide me over for at least a few months…

Next on the upgrade block is likely my speaker system, although I’m not sure that my neighbors will be too pleased about that. We’ll see.

I’m tired of user interfaces that abuse the user. I have a short list of items that contribute highly to my personal annoyance meter. Just to make sure you’re aware, most of these are found in Windows, and I can’t comment on their presence in other systems. Here’s one that doesn’t really qualify for its own paragraph, but still particularly annoys me: websites that have a flash intro to a primarily html site, especially when the “skip intro” option is inside the intro animation, since it essentially makes the site inaccessible to browsers that lack the appropriate plugin. Now, on to the more pressing matters… (more…)

I finally succumbed to the XP and will be upgrading my Win2K machine, once I get a new hard drive to start fresh with. I’m sure people will want to bash me for taking so long, but honestly the added features of XP weren’t worth it to me, until I could buy it at a massive discount.

Good
* Recently used programs
* Desktop icon grid
* Remote desktop host
* Winkey+L (among others)
* Systray day/date
* SP2 added features
* Lockable taskbar

Bad
* Help bubbles constantly popping up from the tray
* Crazy explorer extensions with little utility and lots of bloat

Neutral
* Native CD Burning
* Bubbly multicolored window styles (since I can disable them; Win98 theme forever!)

I recently bought a new monitor for my home PC, a Viewsonic VP171B-2. I can’t decide whether I’m in love with it or if it’s just a crush that’ll leave me with regret. Here’s what I posted on newegg as feedback:

Pros:
* DVI input looks amazing compared with my nice CRT
* Excellent refresh rate
* Excellent color reproduction (had to use video card color adjustment though)
* Stand is very adjustable
* Fairly wide horizontal view range

Cons:
* Bright blue stuck pixel right in the middle of the screen (I had another when it arrived but that one faded away)
* Slight ghosting, noticeable when scrolling a webpage or moving the mouse cursor around, but not bad in games
* VGA input is a little noisy
* Vertical view range is limited, so when pivoted you get a slightly different image to each eye and can’t move around without visible color shift
* My Xbox VGA adapter’s 720p output gets stretched to full-screen 5:4 when it could be rendered in 16:9 at native 1280×720 (apparently the HDTV readiness only works via DVI, but I’m using that for my PC…)
* Every time the video mode changes, a blue box with “Digital” in it appears right in the middle of the screen and can’t be disabled, repositioned, or made translucent like the OSD

Overall it’s an excellent monitor and its clarity puts my CRT to shame. I use a Dell 20″ LCD at work, and this monitor seems nicer to me. I realize this may be the best monitor around for the price, but the stuck pixel, lack of VGA 720p support, and other small annoyances are making me consider a return.