Pro:

The laptop feels sturdy, the screen has little play in it and stays firmly in place to wherever you open it. It looks sleek, is really thin and pretty light. A 15.6 inch screen is a nice balance between size and portability, in my opinion. 17 inches is great but they can weigh a pound or two more as the entire laptop is bigger as a result. 15.6 inches fits in my backback with no problem. Overall I really like the design and build quality of this laptop even if it is plastic. The only aluminum-cased laptops I’ve ever seen are the macbook pro ones from Apple, and those cost upwards of $1500. If you want a metal one, get a macbook.

This thing is fast. The i5-430M is an excellent chip. You can google benchmarks on it. The i3 is 30-40% faster than a C2D, and the i5 is quite a bit faster than the i3.

4GBDDR3 1066mhz (3.68gb usable it says) is excellent. DDR3 is the newest type of RAM and it’s still really expensive. The Gateway website says it recognizes 4gb RAM max, but some people are saying it has 2 empty slots under the keyboard. I have not verified this, so if you’re planning on putting in more RAM, do your research. I wish I could provide that information, but I don’t feel like opening up the whole laptop to check. I don’t plan on adding any more RAM for at least a year because DDR3 is really expensive right now. You’d be better off waiting a year until the price comes down.

320gb 5400rpm hard drive is plenty of space. If you want a 500gb, they’re easy enough to buy online and put in yourself. There are guides online for how to do this; it’s very easy.

The screen looks good. It’s a glossy LED backlit LCD screen. The resolution isn’t super high, but this isn’t a $2000 laptop. It’s 1366 x 768. Most people will want to use the HDMI port to watch blu ray on their LCD/plasma tv, but if you’re like me you’re still waiting for the price on those to come down. With a 15.6 inch screen you can still enjoy blu ray movies.

It will play blu ray movies at 1080p. It has an HDMI out port so you can watch blu ray movies on your HDTV. You can’t burn blu ray movies, but the discs are so expensive that it’s not really something most people are going to want to do anyway. If you are wanting to burn blu ray movies, I imagine you’re going to want to be able to do HD encoding, and for that you really want an i7 quad core desktop setup anyway.

There are tactile buttons up by the screen for mute, volume up, volume down, wireless on, etc. Very cool.

The laptop feels cool to the touch. I had it running for 5 hours and it wasn’t even warm on my legs.

Windows 7 Home is pre-loaded. It’s better than Vista.

The computer will not continue to charge if you plug it in and it’s already a really high charge, say 96-100%. This is a good thing! It means it won’t charge the battery when it’s not needed. So it will say “96% plugged in, not charging.” What ruined my old laptop battery was overcharging. This will extend the battery life.

Cons:

The keyboard isn’t the best ever, but I tend to have low expectations for laptop keyboards. I never buy $2000 laptops, so for the price you can’t expect something incredible. I have no problem with this keyboard. It has the number pad on the right so you can work with numbers a lot easier. My old laptop didn’t have the 0-9 numbers on the right of they keyboard. This is a great feature in an otherwise lackluster keyboard. However, after using the laptop for a day, I feel that the keyboard is adequate and actually not as bad as I had originally thought. It just took some getting used to.

The touch pad is difficult to work with. I adjusted the settings to remove the two-finger gestures and what not, but it still doesn’t work as well as I’d like. I don’t mind because I almost ways carry a laptop mouse with me anyway, so for me it won’t be an issue. If you plan on not carrying a mouse, you might want to look elsewhere.

Normally there are two buttons, one for left and one for right click. This has a plastic bar where you click on the left or right side. I don’t really like it, but for me it’s not a deal killer. It took a little getting used to. I think the advantage that it offers is that you won’t accidentally right click as much. Otherwise it’s an odd bit of engineering. Again this won’t matter if you carry a mouse.

128mb of dedicated video memory is good, but not enough to play most modern computer games that need 256, 512 or higher. If you’re doing something that’s GPU intensive (photoshop, etc) this will be something to consider. If you need more video graphics, look elsewhere. Make sure to update the driver for this: [...]

6 cell battery isn’t the best. 9 or 12 cell would have been amazing, and it’s possible there are 9 or 12 cell batteries available for this. I have read that people get 4 hours on a full charge of the battery this has. I got over 3 and a half hours, but I didn’t time it exactly. With a 9 or 12 cell you’d get well over 5 or 6 hours, easily. If I find a 9 or 12 cell, I’ll probably get one somewhere down the line. For most people 3 hours+ would be plenty of time without a charge. You could sit through 2-3 college classes, perhaps more if you turn the power setting to “Power Saver.”

The webcam is only 0.3 megapixels, but this is fine for most people. I don’t notice much difference between this one and my 1.3mp Hercules Deluxe Glass webcam. Amazon and other places sell nice Logitech 2.0 megapixel ones, so consider buying one of these if you need a really nice webcam. I imagine they’re better than most (if not all) internal webcams.

Overall:

This is a great laptop for the price. It will anything a college student needs unless he or she does something graphics-intensive. If you can get it for $500-$600 it’s a fantastic price. At $750, I’d look elsewhere for one with more video memory and a better case/keyboard/track pad.

Other thoughts:

Gateway makes fine laptops, despite some people thinking the brand is bad. What most fail to realize is that Gateway, Dell, Acer, Apple, Asus or whatever other company don’t make most of the parts that go into the laptop. On this one the processor is made by Intel. The hard drive is made by Seagate. The motherboard is made by another company (I believe this one is an Asus). The RAM for this is from Samsung. Most of the hardware is made by another company. The differences are really in the way the laptop looks: the exterior, the keyboard, the track pad.

Honestly I don’t think the brand really matters as much as people think. I read a statistic from SquareTrade (they provide 3 year warranties) that 10% of laptop failures in the first 3 years of a laptop’s life that were reported to them were from drops/spills/accidents. Don’t eat/drink around your computer and try not to drop it. Other times they report hardware failure. The problem with stats like this is that they don’t account for people like me who don’t buy the SquareTrade warranty. Their stats don’t break down the hardware failures either: RAM failure can be fixed for under $100. Hard drives cost around $50 for a nice new one. Motherboard failure means your laptop is toast. Their stats also didn’t account for how Acer and Dell are two of the top producers of laptops, meaning there are more of them out there to fail.

In the end if you take care of your laptop, don’t let it get dusty, don’t drop it and don’t spill anything on it, it should last three years, at which time you should think about upgrading again.

Download Media Player Classic Home Cinema and use that for watching movies rather than the PowerDVD9 software that comes on the laptop. Also get VLC (another movie player), Avira (free, excellent anti-virus), Spybot S&D, Ad-aware, and CC cleaner. Microsoft Security Essentials is also a pretty decent antivirus, although I prefer Avira. These are all very important applications to have. Stop using Internet Explorer and get Firefox. If you’re careful, you won’t have to deal with getting a virus. Don’t forget to update the video card driver: [...]. I hope this has been helpful.
Rating: 5 / 5