HomeSearchMerchandiseAboutMichael HorowitzMy Computerworld Blog

Dell 1905FP Monitor Gripes This is a 19 inch LCD monitor

Out Of The Box Experience

April 13, 2005. There are no unpacking instructions. Watch where you put your fingers, you wouldn't want to poke a hole in the screen. 

When packed in the shipping box, the front face of the screen faces the bottom of the box. This can't be good. 

There is a one page setup poster that says nothing at all about software. 

The DVI cable is not labeled. 

The setup poster does not say that the stand height is adjustable. It shipped in tall mode (for lack of a better term). The higher size is meant for portrait mode, not the normal landscape mode. If I hadn't lowered it, the monitor might have been top heavy and fallen over. 

The on/off button is in a very bad place - its in the bottom right corner of the screen. Because of this you can't just push the button. Doing so may move the monitor or bend the screen. It should have been in the middle so you pushed against the stand. I have seen Dell 17 inch flat panel monitors where the on/off button is in the middle and it can be turned on/off with a single finger. Turning this monitor on/off requires three fingers, two behind the monitor to prevent its moving. 

The initial BIOS splash screen on an IBM Net Vista machine has an Intel logo in to the top right corner that says "Intel Inside". Not any more. Now it says "Intel Insid" because its truncated on the right. 

When Windows XP Home Edition first starts, the computer briefly displays the words "Windows XP Home Edition" in big letters on a black background. There is a progress bar in the middle of the screen with three green boxes that move to indicate the progress. On this screen, the word "Microsoft" appears in the bottom right corner, but it is truncated to "Micros". 

Windows XP detected the monitor only as a Plug and Play monitor, not as the Dell 1905FP. There are no instructions about how to tell Windows about the monitor (that is, to install the driver or inf file). 

The monitor comes with a CD-ROM disc. What do you do with the disk? It doesn't say. You are left to figure it out on your own. Thanks for nothing Dell. This is disgraceful.

The root directory of the CD has no ReadMe file, but there is a file called qsg_en.pdf. Oh, that's clear. Turns out this is the setup poster. I suppose calling it "setup_poster.pdf" is asking too much. There is also a file called monitor.exe. What does it do? Beats me, and I'm not running software that I have no idea what it is or does.  

There is a file called monitor.html which is the documentation for the monitor. It too says nothing about installing the driver for the monitor. 

  FYI: In Windows 2000 you can update the monitor driver with Control Panel -> Display -> Settings tab -> Advanced button ->
  Monitor tab -> Properties of the monitor -> Driver tab -> Update driver button. 
  I guess because it is so easy, Dell doesn't need to provide instructions. :-( 
  The driver is in file 1905fp.inf on the CD in the root directory.  

When run at 1024x768 the text is fairly fuzzy. In fairness, the native resolution is 1280 x 1024 and any LCD monitor run at a resolution lower than its native one, will not be as sharp and clear as the native resolution. Still, some monitors do this better than others and I found the native resolution rendered text too small to see easily. 

I have not yet looked to see if there is software for pivoting the display from portrait to landscape and back.