When watching DVDs in full-screen mode (monitor is a 17" WXGA Widescreen (1440 × 900 Max Res)), my GF gets an intolerable degree of distortion, hazy & gritty & obviously showing the digital grid. Game-playing & watching DVDs in centered small-screen mode is much better.
With all the praise this laptop got in the reviews, I would think the full-screen DVD graphics would be much better. No amount of adjustments in any video playing system (Windows Media, Real Player, etc.) has helped. Is this normal? Is this fixable by herself, or should she send it back to the dealer? Thank you for your help.
Specs are-
Model: Gateway NX860
Display: 17" WXGA Widescreen (1440 × 900 Max Res)
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 (1.6GHz)
Memory: 1024MB 667Mhz DDR2 Memory (2-512MB)
Hard Drive: 120GB 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
Optical Drives: CDRW-DVD Combo Drive
Video: nVidia GeForce Go 7600 (128MB)
O/S: WinXP
Interesting. If the monitor/hardware was messed up, you’d have problems outside of DVD’s as well.
I’d check the playback settings in whatever software you use to play the DVD’s to see what resolution it uses in fullscreen. You want to make sure it’s using the highest resolution that will display on your laptop’s monitor. If your laptop can display 1440x900 (for example), then you want the DVD to be playing at that.
Alternately, there should be a setting to use whatever resolution your desktop is set at, assuming your desktop is at your laptop’s native resolution.
You’d pretty much have to change this in the DVD software, though, instead of WMP or Realplayer. Just put in a movie and then check the options in whatever comes up.
I recommend “Media Player Classic” It is a very light weight video/music player that can play any video file you can think of and had many options for aspect ratio. You can tell it to keep whatever the video has or always force it to 16:9, 4:3. It a great open source program that i use.
Well, we sent it to Gateway to be serviced. They replaced the Optical Drive & it hasn’t improved things a bit. Something else I didn’t mention here but we did to Gateway, but was overlooked, was an excessive (to us) flexibility to the keyboard
(the keys actually seemed to bounce during typing) and a tendency to overheat
(to the point where it burned to the touch and would discolor the surface upon which it sat.) Are the keyboard and the heating supposed to be this way? And what else might we try? Is this fixable at all or is it the way it should normally be & my GF is just too picky?
Re my assessment- this is a LD relationship so I have not seen the laptop, but computer-savvy friends of her there have & they are mixed about what could be the cause and what to do.
Here’s a summary of what we just wrote to Gateway- She is the “I” here-
The problems with the graphics are still unresolved and I have no idea
what is causing them. It definitely was not the optical drive. The desktop
wallpaper is still very unclear. If one looks at the flowers on the home
wallpaper, they are distorted and not clearly defined. The graphics
of some of my games show pixillation. The video scenes of my games
are very cloudy and blotchy, for lack of a better word. In any part
that would normally have mist or shading, there is a strange blotchiness
and distortion where it should be clearly defined. The DVDs are not any
better. I tried reviewing a DVD I was particularly having problems
with, and the graphics are as blotchy, distorted and pixillated as before.
Was there any inspection of the video card or the drivers, which had been
discussed by various TSRs as possible causes of these problems, or was
this serviced using the quickest remedy possible?
The keyboard still flexes and I cannot believe this is the way this
is designed. When I press a key, almost the entire keyboard moves.
I have experimented with a lot of laptops and have never seen any
design to have this much flex in the keyboard.
Back to the SDMB-
So what do we do? Hold out hope that Gateway can fix it, take it to her local computer services, or take the dealer up on their offer to return it & replace or
refund it?
The only reason there is any hesitancy on the latter is that it was a great deal on
the laptop that we probably couldn’t find again if only we could get the graphics & keyboard fixed. Oddly enough, the heating doesn’t seem to be a problem.
Somethign to remember, laptops and desktops are apples and oranges. The miniatuization and heat tolerances needed in many of these machines makes them poor performers in many high bandwidth tasks especially with things like security suites and such running in the background.
That said, a laptop should be able to do this, but the extra processing power of a fancy video card is pretty much wasted on streamed data like playing a DVD or music because it does not use the extra ram and or processing abilities that card provides
I just revised the OP that I’m going to post on some forums- Gateway is wanting us to send it back for further servicing, so I suppose that is what we are going to do- and the seller is offering to take it back for a full refund, so that’s cool, although that would mean we missed a real bargain if the thing had good graphics.
I’m going to open a new thread with the revised OP. Could the Mods please close this one?