Laptop Thoughts: News & Reviews on Laptops, Netbooks, Slates, and More.

"AMD, Dell, Intel Corporation, Lenovo, Samsung Electronics LCD Business and LG Display today announced intentions to accelerate adoption of scalable and lower power digital interfaces such as DisplayPort and High-Definition Multimedia Interface® (HDMI) into the PC."

It looks like it is finally time to say goodbye to our old friend, the VGA connector. Sure, 2015 may sound like a long way away, but VGA connectors are still being used for many things. In all my years in dealing with technology, I have found that a lot of people, for various valid reasons, are reluctant to upgrade or change their hardware every few years, let alone every few months as some companies might like us to. That means a log of legacy equipment that lies around, and gets used. It took the advent of USB 2.0 and USB Flash drives to put the final nail in the coffin for that aged standard, the 3.5" floppy disk. Well, at least I believe that is what did it. There are certainly millions of older monitors and projectors that will find use for years to come that only offer VGA. My only guess is that before 2015, you might want to pick up stock on a company that offers video adapters.

Are you seeing awful-looking text on an LCD or plasma TV after connecting your laptop or desktop to it via HDMI? Here's a tip that might help. First, some back story...

A couple of weeks ago, I swapped out video cards in the desktop PC that I use as my Windows Media Center computer. A few months earlier, I'd removed my aged Dell 26" 720p LCD TV and replaced it with an LG 32" 1080p LCD TV. I was running over DVI, using a DVI to VGA adapter since the LG TV didn't have a DVI port. Everything looked great, though I wasn't sure if I was really seeing 1080p resolution when I was watching Blu-ray movies - the NVIDIA 7950GT video card was a couple of years old, and I wasn't sure if it would support HDCP over DVI > VGA. I spent a few hours trying to determine if I had an HDCP-compliant chain of devices (computer to video card to display) and found it impossible to find anything that allowed me to easily test this. I'd already purchased the new video card - a low-end, passively cooled ATI 5000 series Radeon card - so I figured "What the hell, I'll just put it in". Read more...