- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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0.5 stars
"DO NOT BUY!"
Pros: For the short time that it worked, it was a speedy machine.
Cons: Overheats, defective AC Adapator kills battery, hinges crack
Summary: I will never again buy any Gateway product. Their customer service was AWFUL from day one. The M520 laptop has KNOWN problems that you can find documented repeatedly if you do some Internet research. Unfortunately, I didn't know this when I bought mine in 2004 and now I'd like to toss it out a window.
I do NOT abuse this machine. I rarely travel with it and the most movement it normally gets is from my lap to a table. Two years is not a reasonable life span for a laptop. During this time, both of my screen hinges cracked and I had to duct tape them. Then it started overheating and shutting itself off. That just got worse until it was doing that many times a day. Then the battery would not charge properly and the machine would not recognize that it was plugged in so trying to operate it at all was a crap shoot. Finally, it got so hot that it melted the AC connector making it impossible to plug it in at all. So....no way to use it on AC power, no way to use it on battery power. Found out that the AC adaptor created the other problems when we tried to plug that adaptor into a Toshiba laptop and it IMMEDIATELY drained the battery on the Toshiba and shut down the machine. Do a Google search for "Gateway M520 problems", you'll see what I'm describing is well documented.
