Gateway MT3705 Vista Notebook Review

<!-- Generated by XStandard version 1.7.1.0 on 2007-02-06T10:20:54 -->

by Morgan Kay

The Gateway MT3705 is a budget notebook that was recently on sale at best buy and Circuit City in conjunction with the release of Vista.  This notebook also has a new processor from Intel, the Dual Core Pentium T2060 processor.

Gateway MT3705

Specs for the MT3705 as reviewed:

• Processor: Intel Pentium Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060 (1.60GHz, 533MHz FSB, 1MB L2 cache)
• Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium
• Display: 14.1&quot; Widescreen Ultrabright™ XGA TFT (1280x800)
• Chipset: ATI Radeon Xpress 200M
• Memory: 1024MB DDR2 at 533MHz (2 x 512MB), expandable to 2GB (total of 2 DDR2 slots)
• Video: ATI Radeon® Xpress 200M Integrated Graphics
• Audio: High-definition 2-channel audio
• Hard Drive: 100GB PATA hard drive (4200 RPM)
• Optical Drives: 8x multiformat dual-layer DVD±RW drive
• 4-in-1 Digital Media Manager™
• Modem: 56K ITU V.92 ready fax/modem (RJ-11 port)
• Network: 10/100Mbps Ethernet LAN (RJ-45 port)
• Integrated 802.11g Wireless LAN
• Interfaces
  • 3 USB 2.0 ports
  • VGA connector
  • RJ-45 Ethernet port
  • RJ-11 modem port
  • Headphone/audio out
  • Microphone
  • Kensington lock slot
  • AC adapter connector
  • Synaptics Touchpad with Vertical Scroll
  • Expresscard Type 54
• Battery: 6-cell lithium-ion
• Dimensions: 1.41&quot;H x 13&quot;W x 9.45&quot;D
• Weight: 5.23 lbs.
• Warranty: 1 year parts and labor

Reasons for Buying:

I purchased this Gateway after a long search for a budget laptop with decent performance to give as a gift.  I didn’t want to spend a ton of money, and also didn’t want to give someone a slow piece of junk either!  After a long search online and a general lack of good deals on budget level notebooks I purchased this notebook on sale at Circuit City for $599.  I had been scouring the internet for a few weeks looking for a good deal on a new laptop, and for $599, including a free printer (after rebates),  Dual Core Processor , DVD Burner,  100GB HD, Vista Home Premium already installed, and 1GB of RAM, it was the best deal I had seen in awhile. The brushed aluminum and flat black case make it an attractive notebook as well -- better looking than the budget offerings from Dell, although the new HP notebooks do look pretty slick.  The 14.1” widescreen seems to be a good compromise between usability and portability.  I think that overall I got a good deal on the laptop.

Build and Design:

(view large image)

The build of the notebook is average.  There are some aspects I really like; the area around the keyboard and palm rests is made of aluminum and feels very sturdy, the lid is a textured flat black plastic that does not show fingerprints, the notebook feels solid when lifted by the corner. The screen shows no wobble when pushed, and the hinges, while plastic, do feel sturdy.  However, you can press on the back of the screen and see ripples without too much effort, I wouldn’t recommend throwing this notebook in a book bag with a bunch of books and things -- the plastic behind the screen probably doesn’t provide much protection.  The keyboard is very spongy, especially on the right side.  If keyboard flex is a problem for you, then do not buy this notebook.  For me, I don’t think it’s such a big deal and I got used to it, although it does make me appreciate the keyboard on my T41 ThinkPad!   For a notebook with these specs in this price range- I wasn’t expecting build quality on the same level of more expensive notebooks.  Overall though, I would say that this notebook exceeded my expectations in build and overall attractiveness.

Gateway MT3705 next to ThinkPad T41 (view large image)

Screen:

Gateway MT3705 compared to Toshiba Satellite and IBM T41 (view large image)

The Screen is a Widescreen 14.1” XGA  type with Gateways “ultrabright” glare-type treatment.  I think the screen looks good, especially next to my IBM T41, but it does have a stuck pixel on the right side in the middle.  The screen is very bright and crisp otherwise.  The stuck pixel is hardly noticeable and doesn’t bother me too much, but it still sucks that it isn’t perfect.  It’s probably worth noting that the display model at Circuit City had a dead pixel as well.  I don’t notice any light leakage.

Gateway MT3705 compared to Toshiba Satellite and IBM T41 (view large image)

Speakers:

The speakers are typical notebook speakers: relatively tinny with no bass.  They probably sound better then my ThinkPad’s (no real accomplishment there) and they are definitely louder, but not nearly as good as my roommates Toshida Satellite 3300.

Processor and Performance:

The Gateway MT3705 comes with the new Pentium Dual Core T2060. The main difference I see is the smaller 1 mb L2 cache.  This shouldn’t be a huge deal for most users, and I couldn’t justify a minimum $100 price jump for another MB of cache in a Core Duo as I didn’t feel the performance increase would be noticable for basic tasks, although I could be wrong.

So far I am pretty impressed with the performance of this notebook.  When used for what it is intended for -- a gift for someone that needs internet, email, and light multimedia machine, not a gamer.  Although the hard drive is only 4200rpm, the notebook isn’t too slow.  Everything is snappy and smooth.  Initially booting up and shutting down are a little long, and programs pause when loading, but nothing horrible- I was actually expecting worse.   I should mention that this is after I uninstalled all the trial bloat ware that came with the computer (Napster, McAfee, BigFix, AOL, etc). 

While there was a lot of trial and bloat ware on there, it wasn’t as bad as recent Dell or HP offerings I have seen.  Before removing these programs, the notebook was almost unbearably slow, and I was at first worrying I made a mistake and contemplated returning it to Circuit City.  Gateway does include a system restore disk so a clean install of Vista is possible, but since there wasn’t all that much unwanted software on there I just deleted what I didn’t want manually. 

Websites load very quickly, and there is virtually no lag when navigating the internet or between programs that are already running.  A faster hard drive would certainly improve load times, but at this price point and for the notebooks intended use, I feel the performance is more then acceptable.  The MT3705 is noticeablely quicker then both my T41 with a Pentium M 1.6ghz 1GB memory, as well as my roommate’s Toshiba Satellite with Pentium M 1.73 1GB memory, and is of course much less expensive then either system was when new. 

The 1GB of RAM and ATI Radeon Xpress 200m in the MT3705 runs Vista Home Premium with Aero without a hiccup that I can see, although I have no real experience with Vista on other systems.   I am no power user, but so far the main differences between Vista and XP I notice are the graphics.  My friends have commented on the similarities in looks to apple’s OSX, and the new IE is a lot like Firefox.  Vista seems like an improvement over XP to me, although I am not going to go through the trouble of installing it on my own computer anytime soon.  The windows User Account Control Window that pops up anytime you open a program is very annoying, although you can probably disable it, I haven’t done so.

Benchmarks:

Super Pi

The Super Pi performance for the T2060 dual core processor was quite bad, slower than some 2-year old Dothan Pentium M processors:

Notebook	Time
Gateway MT3705 (Intel Pentium Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060)	1m55s
HP dv6000t (2.0GHz Core 2 Duo)	1m 03s
Fujitsu LifeBook A6010 (1.66GHz Core 2 Duo)	1m 22s
LG S1 (2.16 GHz Core Duo)	1m 11s
Dell Inspiron e1505 (2.0GHz Core Duo)	1m 16s
Lenovo ThinkPad T60 (2.0GHz Core Duo)	1m 18s
Toshiba Satellite M100 (2.00GHz Core Duo)	1m 18s
Samsung X60 (1.66GHz Core Duo)	1m 29s
Sony VAIO FS680 (1.86 GHz Pentium M)	1m 53s
IBM ThinkPad T43 (1.86 GHz Pentium M)	1m 45s

 

PCMark05 Comparison results:

According to comparison results the T2060 with integrated graphics in the Gateway performed just slightly worse than the Toshiba Tecra M6 with a 1.66GHz T2300E Core Duo (previously the &quot;weakest&quot; dual core Intel mobile processor offering):

Notebook	PCMark05 Score
Gateway MT3705 (Intel Pentium Dual-Core Mobile Processor T2060), ATI XPress 200m	2,639 PCMarks
HP dv6000t (2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo, Nvidia Go 7400)	4,124 PCMarks
Fujitsu LifeBook A6010 (1.66GHz Core 2 Duo, Intel GMA 950)	2,994 PCMarks
Fujitsu N6410 (1.66GHz Core Duo, ATI X1400)	3,487 PCMarks
Alienware M7700 (AMD Athlon FX-60, Nvidia Go 7800GTX)	5,597 PCMarks
Sony Vaio SZ-110B in Speed Mode (Using Nvidia GeForce Go 7400)	3,637 PCMarks
Toshiba Tecra M6 (1.66GHz Intel T2300E, Intel GMA 950)	2,732 PCMarks
Asus V6J (1.86GHz Core Duo T2400, Nvidia Go 7400)	3,646 PCMarks
Sony VAIO FE590 (1.83GHz Core Duo, Nvidia Go 7400)	3,427 PCMarks

Heat and Noise:

I guess one of the upsides of a 4200rpm drive is that the notebook stays quiet and cool.  The palm rest barely gets warm, and when the fan does run it is quiet and hardly noticeable.  The exhaust vent is on the left side of the notebook.  The underside of the machine gets warm, but not to the point where I felt any discomfort.  

Keyboard and Touchpad:

Gateway MT3705 keyboard view (view large image)

As I stated earlier, the keyboard has a good amount of flex.   The flex seems to be worse towards the edges of the keyboard.   I like the touchpad, but would recommend setting the sensitivity towards the lighter end of the spectrum, it comes from the factory requiring a firm touch to get it working. 

The touchpad has a textured finish to it that I like, and the vertical scroll area on the right side is clearly separated by a small raised section.  The buttons below the touchpad are firm and require some pressure to click, I prefer this over them being too sensitive, but it may bother some.  They do feel sturdy though.

There are shortcuts on the keyboard that you can use with the function button, like adjusting volume, screen brightness, CD controls, etc.  Pretty standard stuff, there are no extra volume or other media control buttons like on some other consumer notebooks out there.  Below the touchpad are the indicator lights for, caps lock, scroll lock, Number lock, and hard drive.  There is also a purple light that shines on the front of the notebook when charging, it switches to blue when charging is complete and blinks red when the battery is low.

Input and Output Ports:

The 3 USB ports are all on the left side and the Ethernet connection is on the right side which is annoying.  If you use a mouse and are right handed, this may be an issue for you.  There is a 4-in-1 card reader which is nice if your camera uses any of the media supported.  There is also a VGA connection and ExpressCard slot.

Wireless:

The MT3705 comes with an 802.11G Wireless card.  I don’t know what brand card it is and can’t find the information online, but it has no trouble picking up my home network. Bluetooth and Infrared are not included

Battery:

In “Balanced” mode, Gateway’s medium power saving setting, this notebook gets almost 4 hrs of battery life from the 6-cell lithium ion battery.  Balanced mode is basically medium settings across the board.  If you turn down the screen brightness and make a few other tweaks, surely you could squeeze out some more time.  I am very impressed with the battery life of this system.  Not only is it faster then my ThinkPad, it can last longer away from the plug as well.  I was happy that Gateway didn’t try to cut corners with a 4 cell battery.

Operating system and Software:

Vista Home Premium looks cool and is easy to use.  I would say it is an improvement over XP, although nothing revolutionary for my uses. After I use it more and learn more about its features I am sure more disparities between the 2 will emerge.   The system responds quickly, and looks great. Recovery disks were included by Gateway, and I want to mention that Circuit City was pushing people hard to pay them $69 to burn off recovery DVD’s for this computer at check out.  I don’t think that is very ethical when they know that people can just burn them on their own time at a fraction of the cost, not to mention a recovery CD is included. 

I thought I would mention it for anyone that might be thinking of purchasing this machine from one of the larger retail shops and didn’t know any better.  I removed most of the free software with the exception of the Wild Tangent Games, because I figure they can’t hurt.  The other stuff (McAffee, Napster, BigFix, Etc) was taking up too many system resources and slowing things down, especially during start up, so I removed them manually without doing the clean install. 

Customer Support:

Thankfully I haven’t had to call customer support for this notebook, and hopefully I never will.  I did read on this website that Gateway’s customer support is excellent.

Conclusion:

I am happy with this notebook, I think it represents an excellent value and offers more then enough performance for the average home user needing something for everyday tasks.  I would recommend it to anyone on a budget with average computing needs looking for something portable, or anyone that is simply not looking to blow a huge chunk of change on a notebook.  The MT3705 can also be upgraded with a faster hard drive and maybe another gig of RAM if desired down the road, but I feel that it has exceeded my expectations and is quite quick as delivered.  This laptop has an appealing design and feels sturdy, the lid resists fingerprints and it has great battery life. We’ll have to see how it holds up over time. 

Pros

• Vista Home Premium already installed and all features work
• Better looking then other notebooks in this pricerange, and many more expensive models as well
• Excellent performance
• Very Cool and Quiet
• Overall Sturdy build
• Long battery life
• Great price for what you get
• Media card reader can be useful

Cons

• Keyboard flex may bother some
• Some screen rippling when pressing on back of lid
• All USB ports are on the left side, Ethernet on right may be awkward if you use a mouse.
• Bloat ware slows down the system

 

Thanks for the review mmk, for the price that's a great deal on a Vista notebook (too bad it's $749 now at CC instead of the $599 you paid, you got the deal in time).

It's really interesting to see those Intel Pentium "Dual-Core" T2060 results. It appears it really is the lowest performing dual core Intel offers and I'm really puzzled by it to be honest. There's little info on what the architecture is, but based on that really slow Super Pi score of 1m55s I'm guessing it's not even remotely based on the current Core Duo architecture. Unless that Super Pi score was recorded when not plugged in and the processor was undervolted, that's a really disappointing score.

 

Nice review but the super pi score is pretty disappointing considering that my 2 year old single core processor can beat a T2060.

 

yes why would intel offer an inferior processor when even its pentium m can beat it?

 

I bought this laptop and return the same day. It has too much flex , which makes impossible to type large papers. Now I am waiting for my sexy T60.
Take my advice and don't buy it, if you will be typing a lot.

 

but this is a dual-core , Pentium M is single-core, anyway, and superPi is single threaded

 

Interesting review, that was a pretty good deal. Apparently a dual-core Pentium M. isn't any faster than the old single core Pentium M. It's true, my 1.6Ghz Pentium M will pull 1:55 on SuperPi.

 

Does Aero actually run well on a machine like this, which lacks GPU.

 

Nice review. Its a pretty good notebook for that price.

 

It does not 'lack GPU' but rather it does not have a GPU which uses dedicated graphics memory. You dont need a dedicated GPU to run Aero. An intergrated will run Aero fine as long as it meets the recommended specifications.

 

The Notebook runs Aero without any issues, maybe it would benefit from another gig of memory since the gpu borrows from the system memory, but I think for an average user it is fine as configured.
Regarding the Super-Pi score, I am going to run it again either tonight or in the next day or so. If it is the same, then at least you get pentium M performance when running single-threaded apps with better multi-tasking capabilities when needed- which should be enough for most people looking for an entry level system. We'll see if the new results show any improvement.

 

The dual core pentium processor must work similarly to how the Turion x2 processors work in that they do work better on multitasking but not so much better on single programs like the core duo and core 2 duo does.

 

First off, Metamorphical... *looks at avatar*... I hope you're a chick.

Getting on topic, the Gateway surely has a great looking design. It's respectable battery-life even beats that of the 8-cell on my ASUS W3j; most surprising even though my notebook has a dedicated GPU.

h*tboy (yes the star is intentional lol), could you elaborate on why the keyboard-flex is hindering on your typing experience? I typed a major paper on my old eMachines and nothing bothered me enough to return it (more like due to the cracked hinge but that's another story).

 

I'm thinking we really dodged a bullet when Gateway inexplicably gave us a T2250 instead of a T2060 in our new MX8711. Those numbers are a little disappointing.

 

Is the Radeon Xpress any better than the usual GMA950?
The SuperPi is really odd, so I would test it again. Its approximately the same as the old PenM Sonomas, which is not considered adequate progress. My laptop's 1.86GHz PenM does it in like 1:47 or something.

 

Hey dude! I can understand a little flex, but the flex on this machine was huge, I don't know wether it is on all gateways or only on the machine I returned. As my previous laptop was a sony vaio , it had an excellent keyboard, so I just couldn't get used to gateway.
I checked out some lenovos at the store and I liked their keyboard, it is pretty much like sony's.
It is likely that I returned it because all I do is typing, and I pay too much attention on how comfy the keyboard is. I am a computer science major, so it's very important to have a nice keyboard.
The second think I didn't like is a glossy screen. it's really uncomfortable to see your reflection all the time.

 

Great review MMK. i looked at this notebook at best buy and i did notice that the mousepad needs a firm touch to operate. how do you fix the sensitivity? is it from the control panel?

 

Great review. I saw this notebook at Best Buy today and was actually impressed by the build quality it had for such a low price. The brushed aluminum does set it apart and it's a big plus. For those people that type with their palms resting on the . . . palmrests, this won't wear out like regular plastic.

It will run on anything that meets the recommended specifications as miner said. All the machines at Best Buy had the GMA950 with a few exceptions, and they were all running Aero with no problems.

 

Yeah, I'm starting to wonder who started the whole "GMA-950 can't run Aero well" FUD.

 

I've had this laptop since the day best buy (& CC) offered it for 599 w/ the free all in one printer.. and the day vista came out.. whenever said day was.

I liked vista a lot, but i wanted to play a lot of older games (and newer if possible) but I ran into noothing but trouble playing the games in vista.. I even had to find new emulator programs to work to use the roms I had. That was easily fixed by getting a new set of emulators to play snes/nes ect.
But I tried running Jedi knight2, Return to castle wolfenstien, day of defeat source & counter strike source... even quake 1 &2 gave me nothing but trouble... after the first few days, I knew vista had to go until sometime down the road, and XP had to somehow find itself onto this new laptop I got.

It was not easy, and Gateway customer support gave me the oll' "we don't support going to XP on this computer yadda yadda yadda." In their defense a cool cat via the gateway email help told me how to make a vista back up DVD. So with the worry of never having this laptop run vista again out of my head. Game on, time to put XP on.

and ouch.... no driver support, i had 4 or 5 pieces of hardware including SM bus controller, the graphics adapter, the soundcard, the multi card reader, the wifi card, the ethernet... none of it worked with generic drivers from xp.. er... well.. i guess the graphics adapter worked, but at non-wide screen resolutions that was pretty annoying to work with.. I did however, with time, and patients get all the apropriate drivers working right. Had to use some Omega ATI drivers and still have not gotten the offical straight off the ATI webside drivers to work, but it works. if any of you kids want to get this and get xp on it, you should be able to find the drivers pretty easy now that the T2060 laptops are being used by consumers.

I have to say, I like XP on this laptop much better. Just because of the system resources vista dips into. and games?

Honestly. Not bad. Not for the radion express 200m(128 'dedicated' in the bios rather than the default 62mb), I can play counter strike source and DOD source at the lowest 16:9 resz w/ modest graphics settings and still kick some terriorist (or counter terriorst) ass. And as far as Jedi knight 2 and RTCW 1024*768 all maxed out nice and nice. (single player anyways..) quake 1 and 2 ? wellll they run great, as i'm sure Q3 does also. Have not tried any doom3 engine games or fear or prey or anything... it would probably play painkiller ok... maybe prey and fear... no bells and whistles... fear noooooo bells and whistles... but i mean, common. you might wanna relive the classic with this gpu, you'll do just fine..

Dived into N64 emulators and this laptop eats 'em up. I'm actually pretty impressed with what it can do. Runs winamp's milkdrop visual (which roxx) all tweaked out very nicely. The laptop only has a VGA out which is lame would like a s-vid rca out... I've seen some vga/s-vid adapters and have heard ruhmors the 200m can still throw out some TV video via the VGA with said adapter.

If you wanna do a lot of gaming straight out of the box w/ vista and this laptop.... it might now work out that great...

If you wanna toy and tweak and pop out a laptop that make your buddies go "man my laptop cant do that and I paid $$$$$ and you paid -$$$$$$" and also enjoy playing a few games here and there on the couch while your woman watchs some **** mtv shows. Then this might just be the laptop for you. But it might not be toooo easy to get it runnin just the way you want it to. Sorry if i went on and on. But I wish I had read something like this before I went out to buy it.. I was realllllly on the fence. I'm glad I got it, i'm not disapointed, and long as that solo vga out can do some RCA out with an adapter. We're talking solid city, and that laptop's the f'ing mayor.
-
D

 

Finally got around to retesting the Super-Pi score- It is the same. The notebook still feels faster then my pentium M t41- overall Im still happy with the notebook.

 

I bought this laptop the day vista came out, i found it was a very nice laptop, great price if you got it when it was at 599.99, used gateway tech support a couple of times that was nice. sleep mode with vista is super-exellent, save battery like it is off, but remebers everything you were doing, and only takes a second to wake-up. with a wireless mouse and a bag, its perfect for taking to school. battery life is really good, when you keep the screen light on low, its still easy to see, and you battery can last a very long time. and by the way with the dead pixle, you can find a repeating video on the internet that fixes dead pixles. it flashes red blue green changing every frame, this fixes dead pixles. when played for a couple hours the dead pixles go away. worked wonders with the 7 dead pixles on my psp. not for stuck pixles. anyway back to the laptop, vista is super cool. the battery lock dosent really work, the battery can move out of place and turn the computer off, but it wont fall off. the computer is kinda slow, im not super good with computer hardware and how they work, so if you have any recommendations on how to make my computer faster, please email me at [email protected], thanks. either way, if you find this computer for less than 700 i would recommend buying it.

 

I just returned MT3418, a similar Gateway with an AMD processor.

PC worked fine, but left button of touchpad broke within a week.

Touchpad on this one is the same, beware.

 

Just an update regarding the previous comment=the left trackpad button on the MT3705 I purchased is getting very loose, although it still works (for now). I hope there is still a warranty on this thing as I am going to have to get a replacement before the button craps the bed completely. Since the notebook is only a few months old, this is completely unacceptable in my view, for obvious reasons. I would say the notebook is used less then average at best- needless to say I am disappointed with Gateway at this point.

 

I have the same exact laptop - MT3418 ... same as the laptop reviewed but as you say with a AMD -Turion MK-36 single core processor. I bought this laptop about 3 to 4 months ago, and for the price I paid $549.99 w/ free printer I couldn't be more pleased. Sorry to hear that the left button of the touchpad died on you. I honestly don't like the touchpad on these notebooks very much either. Both buttons make a loud "click" sound every time pressed. 90% of the time though I use my notebook mouse and rarely use the touchpad that is equipped with the computer.

The build quality was the major reason why I bought this laptop; my previous laptop a Dell Inspiron 600m which I had for 2 years had very poor build quality overall. And this laptop was heads and tails better than that, doesn't seem to have any chassis flex or the base flexing when picked up from one side. And the case lid shuts flush with the palm rest, which my old Inspy did not. As the reviewer of the MT3705 is right though the keyboard on these laptops are junk. Not good at all. If you do a lot of typing on these you may want to look elsewhere. For me, I wanted to spend the bare minimum to repalce a computer that would break due to a shotty casing design.

Regardless, most people know what they're going into when they're only paying under $600 for a laptop. And for that it's pretty good. Although I truly recommend puting Windows XP back on as 1GB of RAM and a 4,200 HD does not bode well unless you have maybe 3 windows open total. Especially since a little more than 800MB of RAM is available after the GeForce Go 6100 eats some of the RAM. With XP, there's a noticeable speed increase across the board.

After owning it though now for a little while, I wish it had a Intel processor and the hard drive while not hot at all - is very slow. Oh well ... for a year or two this thing will do the trick but long term, you might want to look for something a little different.

 

I just got this laptop, but I can near the fan, altho not loud, but noticable. Is this normal? Or is it suppose to be almost comepletely silent?

 

It's normal.

On another note - just thought I'd check in now that I've owned my MT3705 for 10 months, with heavy use for watching movies, listening to music, browsing the web and assorted other tasks typical for a home user. This is my main computer. I'm very happy about the $650 I spent on this machine and don't regret it one bit. Nothing has broken until the last few days when my audio (headphone and speakers) has gotten a bit distorted on low end sound. I should be able to deal with this by getting a cheap USB sound card. A bit disappointing, but the audio is definitely still usable for now. Just not great for all the movie watching I do.

Overall this laptop is a great ad for the value of simplicity in laptops. The integrated graphics work great for movies and since I don't game on it, I'm really happy with the low heat production and good battery life that come from it. The styling really is good and absolutely nothing about the body or build is coming loose or has fallen off. It really is well built. It was also easy to upgrade the ram, and the hard drive and wireless card are easily accessible with their own doors underneath.

There are two clear disadvantages I've seen versus my wife's HP DV2470 (AMD laptop, also 14"). First, her wireless card picks up a signal better (believe it's an intel 801.11b/g vs the cheap Realtek card in the Gateway), although the Gateway still does fine. Second, the HP's screen is significantly brighter and more clear, although it is actually more grainy and I don't think the color reproduction is quite as good sometimes. The general impression you get when comparing the two is that my Gateway's screen is finer grained (though the resolution is actually the same), but darker and a little over contrasted.

Really love this thing for the money and I would definitely recommend one of it's successors that are available now with upgraded specs (MT37**).