Friday, February 22, 2008

An "Ah Ha!" moment

So yesterday I managed to install Leopard on my laptop only to discover that using a 9GB partition wasn't such a great idea since it seems Apple is just as guilty of trial-ware as Microsoft is. So this morning I'm reloading Leopard again but that's not the "Ah Ha!" moment.

Currently I'm working on a Toshiba Satellite 2805-S402 laptop with a 700mhz P3 and 384M of ram. I plugged it into a 19" flat panel but the best I'm able to get on the screen resolution is 1280x1024. This is a real problem for me since I'm used to something like a 5280x1200 resolution across my 3 screens. To say I'm running out of desktop space is an understatement.

I realized the problem was that icons and text were just too large so I started poking around. In Fedora 7 you can change the fonts dpi and that was my "Ah Ha!" moment. Going to System->Preferences->Look and Feel->Font and then clicking on the Details button gets you to the Font rendering details. Lowering the resolution from 96 to 85 makes all the difference.

Now it's hard to believe that I was working on this laptop regularly back in 2004 and 2005 before I bought the faster P4. Today I have a 1 year old Centrino Duo 2.2Ghz w/ 2GB of ram and I'm already looking at a Dell m1330 Core Duo 2.6Ghz with 4GB of ram to be my next traveling computer as it only weights 4 pounds. Oh how great technology is!

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