Gateway M6824 > Reviews > A Serious waste of energy.

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Slow
Look & Feel	Satisfactory
Comfort & Portability	Poor
Robustness & Durability	Satisfactory
Value For Money	Very poor

Advantages:	Well specced
Disadvantages:	wrong OS for machine, poor layout

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

Ok, So, I needed a cheap laptop to do while my computer was being reworked.
And what a mistake this one turned out to be!
Its slow, unreliable, difficult to type on.... but let me explain.

I paid over three hundred pounds for this machine. And in all honesty, thirty would have been overpaying.

Features wise its not too bad - wireless, decent quality screen, good keyboard action.
Unfortunately, this is more than offset by the little niggles.
Vista - this machine is simply not powerful enough! It would cope absolutely fine with XP, but Vista hogs so much of its meagre gig of memory that nothing runs fullspeed. Its not compatable with so many of the programs and games I know and love... the list of niggles with vista is endless.
The layout - Oh dear god, but whoever designed this machine clearly did not use their brain! You physically cannot type without knocking the mousepad, which flips you out of the program you're typing into and causes havoc. Irritating to say the least!
Drivers - Ok, so maybe a little more technical here, but when I had to reinstall everything on the machine - including *shudder* Vista - there was NO driver disk, and finding the drivers online was next to impossible.
Wireless - This machine doesn't seem to be able to cling onto a network for more than half an hour at a time - whether this is just my machine or everybodies I do not know, but after around half an hour it will simply fall off the network and it can take upto an hour to persuade it to reconnect.

So, if you don't mind a slow, irritating and badly laid out laptop, then this is the machine for you. If you want something with a little more quality, do what I've done for years, and buy a toshiba!