notebook screen resolution

[Ewat]

I'm thinking about buying the Dell Inspiron 1520, but I'm having trouble deciding whether I should choose a display with a resolution of 1440x900 or 1680x1050.

I'm going to be using my notebook for a lot of word processing and web browsing, so I'm worried that a resolution of 1680x1050 will cause the text to be small and difficult to read. Is there a huge difference in text size on the two resolutions? Also, would the lower resolution be very noticeable during gaming?

 

[ohmide]

For a 15.4" widescreen I say got for 1440x900, but that's my personal feeling.

 

[Ruptga]

The lower res could be very noticable in gaming if it means being able to run the game at the screen's native res, laptop GPUs are notoriously weak

 

[AmigaMan]

honestly I thought 1440x900 would be too low of a res for me after coming off a 1600x1200 LCD. But on my Macbook Pro, it looks real nice and I've gotten used to it. Although I do hook up a second external LCD at 1600x1200 for web development. The LCD on my MBP is nicer though.

 

[esun]

Higher is almost always better on laptops. I would highly recommend going with the highest res you can get.

 

[fuzzybabybunny]

Definitely go higher. I'm personally looking for a smallish laptop with a 1920x1200 screen. My current laptop has this, but it's kinda on the big side. They can afford to make the screen even smaller and still have easy to read text.