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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Pleased with product features and quality"
Pros: Nicer display screen panel, faster hard-drive than Toshiba 4200RPM. Comfortable dimensions, quality audio, good battery life. Quality Intel subcomponents: Video, Network, Chipset, etc.
Cons: Pre-loaded with too much junk. System restore CD's are blank and you must back-up your HDD onto CDR. HDD partitioned unwisely.
Summary: They partitioned the HDD into 2 parts: 50GB for me, and 10GB for Gateway maintanence. 1/6th of the HDD space essentially hidden.
They also pre-loaded it with AOL, RealPlayer, and a bunch of unnecessary background tasks hogging memory and CPU cycles. I even found a foreign add-on connected to the Windows Update module.
I wiped out everything from the HDD before finding there are no system restore CD's. Not even a Windows CD. Apparently you're supposed to backup your hard-drive by yourself. The CD's they give you are marked System Restore, but they're blank. You need to make them yourself, and there's nothing to do a selective restore with if for instance one thing dies and you want to reinstall it from its original installation program.
So I simply repartitioned the hard-drive, reinstalled the whole OS and downloaded all the device drivers myself. The finger-pad driver, for example, hogs 10MB all the time with a system-tray icon and settings pages always resident in memory, so I used the generic Microsoft and Intel drivers as much as possible. I also removed any extra memory-resident utilities that the drivers tack on. Like, Intel has unnecessary wireless utilities and display adapter utilities always resident in memory - it's pointless for them to do that, you can load it on demand and it's much better.
So, after redoing the horrible Gateway system configuration, it ends up being a lean-mean racing machine.
The 5400RPM HDD is much faster than any 4200RPM that Toshiba offers, and the display is nicer. It uses high quality Intel and Microsoft components, but like I said it does not come optimized out of the box.
