6. The Display: One Annoying Problem

Aside from the size of fonts and such, the Sony's display does have an additional drawback. Its resolution is only 1024 x 600. While almost all Windows windows adjust nicely to this resolution, some dialog boxes, especially dialog boxes for non-Microsoft manufactured software, sometimes don't so adjust.

I really got pissed off for a while when I tried to print a piece of UX180P documentation done in Adobe Acrobat. The Acrobat Print dialog box was too big to fit on the 1024 x 600 display. The bottom of the dialog box was not visible on the screen. The bottom of the box, of course includes the OK button to make printing happen. The best I could do was to blindly tab until I thought I was on the OK button and then print. It didn't help my frustrations that the Printing Preferences dialog box for my HP LaserJet 1320 was also too big for the screen. It was so big I couldn't even see all of the options on most pages of the box.

Only part of the Adobe Acrobat Print dialog box shows on the UX180P's display. Click on the image above to see a larger version

Only part of the HP LaserJet 1320 Printing Preferences dialog box shows on the UX180P's display. Click on the image above to see a larger version

Sony's higher end tech support staff had seen this problem before in other computers. The answer, rotate the screen to PDA (portrait) orientation. It sort of worked as you can see below, but I really don't like making this switch or having to move the dialog box to get to its different parts. I work in landscape mode almost all of the time and I don't want to have to go into portrait mode to complete a print request.

Click on the image above to see a larger version.

Click on the image above to see a larger version.

The Sony tech told me that the only way to solve the problem, other than getting third party software manufacturers to adhere to Microsoft specs, would be for Sony to redo the BIOS and/or modify the display driver (currently the UX180P uses the standard Windows display driver) and/or modify the display hardware. That's a lot of busy work just to deal with errant software manufacturers.