Little UMPC? Meet Mr. Big Monitor. Now go play nice.
The DHL delivery girl got a hug because my 24-inch monitor arrived today. I’ve just tweaked the home office setup with this $300 (refurbished said the penny-pinching, full-time blogger) display and it now becomes the primary monitor for the Samsung Q1UP. Since this UMPC supports resolutions at 1920×1200, I decided to take advantage of it: the 1440 x 900, 19-incher was nice, but I was running out of real estate with all of those Firefox tabs open.
This is a honkin’ big monitor. I think I could arrange nearly six UMPCs on the face of it if I laid it down. I feel more productive already, although it might affect my mobile usage. No, I’m not going to carry this around with me… if I was going to do that, I might as well lug an HP Dragon! I’m wondering how I’ll feel on the 1024 x 600 Q1UP display at 7-inches when I hit up Starbucks tomorrow…. Any UMPC owners dealing with "large external monitor withdrawal" these days?
In any case, at least someone will get good use out of the not-so-old 19-inch monitor. The country S.P.C.A. is in need of monitors and PCs, so I’ll drop the display off. I hear the cats and dogs like to watch "Stupid Human Tricks" on YouTube.
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Does the big monitor slow down the UMPC much?
Does docking result in the computer switching automatically to the monitor’s proper resolution?
Wow, that monitor is so big it’s already in the clouds. :)
Hotness.
As I was reading your post my dog came upstairs and wanted me to say thankyou for your kind donation even though it wasn’t for him.
Aren’t you supposed to be using one of the clouds in the sky as your monitor?
I sometimes hook up my Q1U-V to 19″ LCD monitor. It works fine, but the screen quality is less ideal because Q1u doesn’t have a DVI out port. Pictures and movies look fine on the monitor, but I feel uncomfortable reading texts on it especially when I compare the quality to gorgeous Q1u screen. Do you have the same problem, Kevin? Is there anyway to improve screen quality? (maybe something like d-sub-DVI adapter?)
What brand/model is it?
Congrats Kevin, it looks like your finally moving on up :)up in the cloud. I use a 22″ LCD for my Fujitsu U810 with the docking station and works great. I know what you mean about having lots of pages open. By the way I have my U810 and my SR Macbook Pro hooked up to the same monitor. The Mac goes to the DVI and the U810 goes to the VGA.
I tried hooking up my Q1 (vanilla) to a 36″ Samsung high-definition TV for a lark; got it sort of working after about 10 minutes of messing around, but getting the touchscreen registration to match the big screen was something I didn’t master in that brief time. It was fun trying, though.
— Steve
Mickey, if there’s any lag in the UMPC due to driving the big monitor, I’d say it’s barely noticeable. Hard to say. Remember that I put a 2 GB RAM module in the Q1UP so even if 128 MB of RAM is shared with video, I still have plenty of memory to use with the 1.33 GHz Core Solo. I believe this chipset can share 256 MB, but I don’t see that support in the BIOS yet. As far as res size when docking / undocking: I don’t yank the VGA cable out. I first use the Samsung or Intel utility to tell the UMPC where to output the display. Doing that ensures that the resolution is correct after the switch. That’s the only way I’ve seen to keep the res correct without fail.
Ignar, I don’t see any degrading in picture quality with this monitor over the VGA cable. It’s stellar, to be honest. I’ll see if I can snap a good picture later in the day.
Nomo, this is a Samsung SyncMaster 245BW. I bought it from eCost for $300 plus shipping as a recertified unit.
HG, this has DVI input as well and that probably explains why you see the Mac on the side of the picture above. ;)
Kevin: It is disappointing that one has to do undocking and docking with manual resolution changes. On XP, this was something that just worked. On the Intel forums (http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/forums/30251460/ShowThread.aspx#30251460) we are tinkering to find a workaround to make Vista work as well as XP did, but so far without success. This is disappointing since docking was touted as something much improved in Vista, and the result so far seems to be the opposite.