Meh, this is my personal strikeout against gateway laptops. If you are thinking of getting a laptop (now or in the near future) do NOT go for a gateway laptop, their hardware is crap.
In the year that I've owned my laptop now, I can't tell you all the problems I've had with the stupid thing.
When I first got the laptop, it would randomly crash and go to the blue screen of death for no reason whatsoever, so I looked around for any viri on my computer, none. spyware/adware, none. So I figured it was probably a hardware problem and I noticed one time on the boot up it actually said what the problem was (it flashed up for a whopping 3 seconds) and I noticed that it said something about the PCMCIA controllers or something like that. So, once I boot up, I go in to the device manager and disable the PCMCIA card slots and voila, no more blue screen of death, and also no PCMCIA ports, wahoo.
Then, after that, I start playing a game on the laptop and realize after an hour or so of playing that my hands are feeling really warm, so I touch my hand to the keyboard and have to take my hand away because it's so fricking hot. I quickly turn the computer off and unplug the power and turn it over, and I notice that the fan that blows air OUT of the laptop is on the BOTTOM, so in other words, if you want to place the laptop on a table, you CAN'T or you'll melt the table and/or laptop, because it's blowing hot air right back at itself, how grand of gateway to do that. And the fan's not even that powerful either, when I prop up the laptop with something on the back the computer still heats up whenever I'm doing anything processor intensive above normal heat amounts, which is just stupid.
And if you'll all recall, a couple months ago, some keys on my laptop have stopped working (including, but not limited to, y, 6, comma, right shift, escape, and the F5 key). So I have been having to use my USB keyboard just so that I can type without having to use an onscreen keyboard! And to top that off, because of the usb keyboard, I have to have a usb mouse attached to the side because it's a hassle to move your hand from the keyboard to the touchpad and ends up being just unproductive.
Yet another thing, just recently I was playing the game freelancer, and I forgot to prop up my laptop on something to keep it somewhat cool, and low and behold, an hour or two in to the game, my laptop just completely randomly turns off! I check the power, fine, battery, fine, no real reason why it should turn off, so I go to turn it on, and all of a sudden the 5 lights on the top start flashing on and off and nothing happens. I try to turn it off, nothing happens, so I take out the power cable, still flashing, and then I have to take out the fricking battery just to have them stop flashing. I then feel the laptop and notice that it's insanely fricking hot again, and I'm assuming that it turning off was the safety feature in the hardware to keep my house from setting on fire because gateway doesn't know the bottom of a laptop from the side and can't figure out where to put fans so they work effectively.
Let's see, another thing, my battery has also now reached a life span of a whole 5 minutes. Yup, five minutes. If I unplug it from the wall to go somewhere, I have just enough time to run from one room to another and plug it in again.
So, let's look at this, I have a computer that needs an external keyboard plugged in, needs an external mouse, and must be plugged in to the wall....sounds familiar, OH WAIT, IT SOUNDS LIKE A FRICKING DESKTOP COMPUTER!
Oh, and did I mention the usb ports randomly don't work either?
-edit-
oh, and did I also mention that most of the hardware crap that's been going on happened within about 2 weeks of the warranty expiring? figures eh?
ARGGGG I hate this laptop
Don't go gateway, that's all I can say.
