I’ve been away from the whole “forums” business for a few months, but I recently started hanging out on the NotebookReview.com forums and I realized, again, just how much people tend to bitch, moan, and argue with each other online.  A lot of people just conveniently forget how to conduct a civilized discussion on the internets.  I see it on Digg all the time but most Digg comments and arguments are at least hilarious.  On tech forums, a lot of discussions get ugly because of how opinionated people are.  The mentality of “my way is best and your way sucks” permeates throughout and it’s annoying.  Everybody has a right to have their own opinions but forcefully imposing them on others is not right.  Don’t even get me started on fanboys.

The reason I’ve been on NotebookReview is that I’m researching what people think of the laptops that I’m after.  There are some large threads on the whole LED vs. CCFL backlighting issue.  While LED has a lot of support, there are those who are willing to take the higher resolution CCFL displays over LED ones.  This is something I’ve been wondering about too.  Should I take the 1440×900 LED-backlit display or the 1680×1050 CCFL one?  If I was to buy the XPS M1530 right now, I would pick the LED because Dell is not offering the 1680 panel anymore - possibly because a lot of the panels made by Samsung had a grainy look to them.  The LED display is certainly a bright sucker but how much screen real estate will I lose by going down one notch?  I mean, I do have my external display at 1680 and I can probably have a dual screen setup which would increase the effective resolution.  That actually sounds like fun - use one display for the browser and the other for videos or anything else I might want to do.

But, but, but, I’m still waiting for Montevina and the GeForce 9M series to make it to laptops.  Judging by the Lenovo ThinkPad leaks, it seems as though Montevina will also bring in DDR3 RAM to laptops - a welcome upgrade over the DDR2 667 that’s been on offer for ages.  But seriously, Lenovo needs to hire someone to redesign the ThinkPads - they are fugly.