Less elegant, however, is the experience of moving between docked and non-docked usage. That one cable drives the display, the mouse, the keyboard, whatever USB storage she needs, and her Ethernet connection. (This would make it easier to move between the “docked” desktop setup and the portable mode at the standing desk.) So I grabbed a Plugable USB-C Docking Station from Amazon, and the results have been pretty great: She actually uses two USB-C cables (one for power, one for the dock), but it’s a much less tangly experience than before. With the new HP Spectre, I wanted to get her going with a more elegant solution, perhaps involving a single cable. But I digress.)įor the past several years, my wife’s “desktop” PC setup has included a portable PC of some kind (a 13-inch Samsung Series-9 Ultrabook for a while, then that HP Spectre x360) connected to a 27-inch display, keyboard, and mouse using a USB-based hub and a tangle of wires. (It’s a little more complicated than that she was also using an HP Stream 11 at a standing desk and was hoping to find one thin and light machine she could use both at her normal desk and the standing desktop. I recently switched her from a 2015-era HP Spectre x360 to the 2016-era HP Spectre laptop that I reviewed back in July. She doesn’t care about anything I just described, and she just wants to get work done. (That is almost not an exaggeration.)īut back to my wife, who I often offer up as a so-called normal user. Learning Java and Android software development has been an easier task than just getting the development environment to look and work correctly on my portable PCs. Android Studio is a great example: It’s poorly made and designed, and aside from the rampant performance and reliability problems, its inability to handle high DPI displays remains my major stumbling block. In my own usage, I still run into desktop applications that work poorly on high DPI displays. I had to buy a more modern version, Photoshop Elements 14, to use on these devices. But on modern portable computers, like Surface Book, the menus and other onscreen interfaces are too tiny to read or accurately select because this app doesn’t scale. For example, my well-worn copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 11 still works just fine on my desktop PC, where the display scaling on the 27-inch 1080p display is set to 100 percent. Where this functionality falls apart is legacy apps, especially older desktop applications that have never been updated for these modern display types. Otherwise, the icons and other onscreen items would be too small to see or use. Surface Book and other PCs with high-DPI displays will ship with this setting enabled somewhere in that range. Windows 10 of course handles this in a fairly elegant way, assuming you’re only talking about the OS itself and modern Windows Store apps: Using Display settings (Settings, System, Display), you can scale the UI from 100 percent-the default on “normal” (non-high-DPI) displays-to 125 percent to 250 percent, or even more, depending on the display.
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