Shopping for Laptop Netbook Computer Component Printer & Accessories

Best Bang for Your Buck
Researched many laptops. Wanted portable and light but a netbook has such a low-tech set-up and upgrade will bring price to a full-sized laptop. This is a bit bigger than netbook with advantage of a full-sized keyboard. Extremely light and portable. Best of all, 500g hd, 4g memory, and 8 hr battery. Can't beat it.

Excellent ultraportable laptop, great value
This laptop is an excellent value, fast, versatile and light. It has a host of features: both vga and hdmi outputs, 3 usb ports, a dvd drive, a large hard drive and plenty of ram and power and speed in the processor, all in a light 3.5 pound package. This baby has me very comfortably waiting out the "tablet/Ipad" wars. Highly recommend.

Nice compromise between netbook and full-blown laptop
Although it is not perfect, for the 0 price tag, the Gateway EC1456u is a nice step up from a netbook while still keeping the weight and size in ultraportable land.

Pros: the 500gb hard drive and fast processor mean fewer compromises. I have 80gb of files I need access to in my Dropbox and it was nice to watch that all transfer without having to worry about filling up the hard drive.

This machine is also relatively fast, given the weight and relative lack of excess heat even when going full bore. I read on some sites that running games on the integrated Intel graphics was iffy at best. I installed my addiction of the moment - World of Warcraft - and was able to get 15-20 FPS in populated areas like Dalaran and 20-30 FPS in non-city areas at full-screen resolution. Ramped the graphic back a bit to 1024x768 and I was hitting 40 FPS. Tried a bunch of lower end games off Steam like Torchlight, and they ran fine too at more-than-acceptable frame rates.

Cons:

- the keyboard is not nearly as good as other reviews would lead you to believe. I can touch type at 150wpm and the keyboard took some getting used to. Yes it is full-size, but the keys are completely flat which makes it hard to tell at times which key you're pressing -- slightly smaller keys or even a chiclet style keyboard as on some of the Toshiba netbooks would have worked much better.

- as in most small notebooks/netbooks, the trackpad and buttons are crap. I just turn them off and use a wireless mouse instead, though, so I assumed that going in.

- I really couldn't care less about this, but if you do be warned -- the case is fingerprint smudge city.

Overall:

I am extremely happy with this laptop. It really fits the bill as an ultraportable laptop that is a lot more powerful and fully equipped than a netbook, but still in the 3 pound take-it-anywhere weight range.

Great notebook for battery and portability
Using this laptop steadily for the last few days and the battery life has proven to be excellent. I'm consistently getting 6-7 hours of life without needing to resort to tricks like dimming the screen or avoiding certain types of applications (video, etc)

Other pros:
.Love the 500GB Hard Drive-- don't see this filling up anytime soon, even after adding lots of media files, documents and installing applications

.Processor is adequate for everything I've done so far - web surfing, videos, productivity apps- also the 4GB ram is a plus

.Incredibly light - I'm used to lugging around 15-in laptops for work, I can barely tell that this in my bag

.Screen resolution is also very good; easy to read documents and websites

.Didn't come preloaded with too much bloatware

The only con I have so far is the touch pad. The multi-touch control is pretty useless and I find myself inadvertently zooming-in/out of open windows. I'm mostly using an external USB mouse so this is not a major issue.

I would highly recommend this system to anyone who wants the portability of a netbook but requires a good deal more disk space and memory.

Very good little computer
This laptop fills a very specific niche: It is compact enough to have the effortless portability of a netbook, but has the processing speed, RAM and hard-disk space, and quality of assembly to mark a significant step up from the ubiquitous 0-0 (Atom processor/Windows Starter/1 GB RAM) netbooks. I have owned a couple of those, and tried out several more at retail stores - they are all glacially slow, prone to freeze, essentially incapable of running any memory-intensive tasks, and feel cheap. I should mention perhaps that I am a long-time Mac user; The Gateway does not replace my Macbook, but Windows 7 is definitely the best-functioning iteration of that OS I have used, and Apple does not make a computer with this combination of price point, capacity and speed. I travel a lot, and this unit is very small and light. It starts up quickly, has excellent battery life, good enough screen and keyboard for my eyes and fingers. I had considered another one of the ASUS netbooks, but after upgrading the RAM, installing a more functional OS (Windows Starter is pretty woeful), you would be approaching the price of this Gateway, and still have a machine that is significantly inferior. If you are shopping for a netbook and can make the price jump to the EC1457 without wincing too hard, you won't be disappointed.