How to make your laptop screen 2 inches bigger

I love a good noobie story. They reinforce why I started this business. Here’s one that happened to me earlier today.

A client of mine in Pittsburgh asked me to help him purchase a new laptop. I asked him my usual pre-purchase questions and we eventually decided on a really nice Toshiba laptop.

Toshiba Satellite A505-S6973 16.0-Inch Laptop - Black/Grey

Wrong laptop?

A few days later, his laptop arrived via FedEx and he called me in a panic.

“They sent me the wrong laptop”, he said.

I asked how he knew it was the wrong laptop and he told me it was because the screen was too small. He told me he even measured it to be sure.

“It’s 14 inches and I was supposed to get a 16 inch screen.”

I had a hunch right away so I asked him how he measured the screen.

“I took a tape measure and measured it. 14 inches across.”

And there it was. The magic word… across.

I told him to measure it again, but this time at a diagonal, from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner. There was a slight pause.

“16 inches exactly.”

Bad assumptions

This is a perfect example of assumptions that we techies sometimes wrongly make. We assume that everyone knows that monitors, like their television counterparts, are measured diagonally.

Not everyone does. But hopefully they do now.