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Happy Easter to you

I hope you’re enjoying this Easter period, for whatever reasons are important to you. I certainly am. As part of my recent decision to get rid of my old PC and laptop and upgrade to a new desktop replacement laptop, the new laptop arrived last week. I’ve been configuring it for the past couple of days, trying to get it to work properly. It looks like similar to this:

metabox-laptop

It’s a custom-build Metabox brand (metabox.com.au), which is similar in quality and capability to Alienware laptops, but a bit cheaper.

It’s got a 15.6″ screen that’s essentially a ‘retina’ screen that supports a 3k display (2880 x 1620), with an integrated graphics card as well as a separate 2Gb graphics card. It’s also got 16Gb of RAM, a 256Gb SSD, and a 500Gb HDD.

I’m quite enjoying it, but I’ve found a few issues with it I wasn’t expecting.

The wifi card kept on dropping out every time I tried playing a game, which seemed pretty ridiculous, not to mention it prevented me from playing the game! After a day of research and troubleshooting I worked out two things about it. First, it was designed so that if there was excessive CPU activity, then the wifi card would shut down to conserve power. What the…? Second, in order to fix that ‘feature’, I had to modify it so it would only work at 5GHz frequency. That certainly fixed it… and by modifying its frequency, the CPU no longer engaged in excessive activity. Pretty damn stupid. You can thank the geniuses at Intel for that.

Secondly, the 2Gb graphics card is supposed to support an external display resolution of up to 3600 x [something], but on my 2560 monitor it only supports 1920 x 1080.

This has caused me no end of grief, I can tell you. Because a 1920 resolution display on a monitor that is supposed to be at 2560 means there’s lots of expanded windows and text to fill up the larger display, with lots of pixellation occurring.

The laptop is fine, but the graphics card doesn’t work with the external display as it’s supposed to.

Further research and troubleshooting found that Metabox put the display connections into the integrated graphics card instead of into the separate 2Gb graphics card, so that it only supports a single display of up to 1920. Again… wtf?

I sent them an email today essentially asking them why they did this, and how it can be corrected. I’m sure there’s some kind of design decision occurring here, but I’m curious as to what justifies it.

If it’s not something that can be corrected, then I’ll have to live with it and sell my 27″ monitor and downgrade to a 1920 x 1080 24″ monitor instead.

First world problems, I know. I’ll adapt.

On Monday I’m going to be picking up a ‘new’ (used) Samsung Galaxy Note Pro 12.2″ tablet. I’m buying it from someone who lives a few hours north of me, so we’re going for a leisurely drive up there to pick it up, and then another half hour on to Wollongong for lunch. That should be a nice day.

What’s a Galaxy Note Pro 12.2? I’m glad you asked. It looks like this.

galaxy note pro 122

Why yes, it certainly does have 4 different apps running at the same time on that screen!

It’s going to be fun.

So that’s my Easter in a nutshell… very much a tech-filled weekend! And I’m loving it.

How’s your Easter going? I hope it’s not so tech-filled, and you’re having lots of chocolate eggs!

 

UPDATE: In October last year I wrote about how I wanted to return to using an Apple laptop (Shifting back towards Apple computers). However, since then I got into Elder Scrolls Online (in December), and high-end gaming has become something of a major requirement for whatever laptop I ended up with. Apple laptops just aren’t suitable desktop replacements for high-end gaming, so it looks like I’m with a Windows laptop for at least another 3-4 years.


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