Christian’s Blog

I got a Gateway NV-52 recently and so far I am very happy with it. I am typically a fan of Dell. Its not that they make the most compelling computers – although they do have a wide variety to choose from – its that their warranty is so compelling. I have an DELL XPS 420 which I love, an older Inspiron, 1525 for my wife, 1501 for my daughter, a Dimension E521 for my son and a Mini-9 for me for travel and fun. All computers are great and run very well. Recently, however, I wanted a larger more powerful laptop than my paltry Mini-9. So I shopped for a laptop with a 15” display dual core, 3-4Gb RAM.

Dell has a reasonable machine in this space, but my eye was captured by the Gateway NV52. It has a large comfortable keyboard with a full sized number pad and a gorgeous display. I am going to use it mostly for hobbyist stuff and moderate gaming so that dual-core AMD Turion at 2.17 Ghz is acceptable – plus its nice to have an AMD proc back in my hands.

The laptop came with Windows 7 Home Premium a fine OS selection. Above the keyboard is a touch sensitive area to enable wireless, mouse pad gestures, file copy, and volume. Laptops now-a-days all have these kind of buttons. I don’t get it .. why they need to be touch sensitive, but oh well.

The audio is some Dolby thing that is supposed to be good, but its a frakking $500 laptop – I don’t expect to have awesome audio. Regardless, the sound is strong.

Performance wise its a performer. I have ripped a few DVDs without being concerned about the speed of the DVD multi-drive. I can run SimCity and Command & Conquer just fine. I don’t think I will ever run a FPS on this machine.

I’d love to expand to 8Gb of Ram but at half the price of the laptop … Ill live with 4Gb.

My only concern is warranty. I hope to have this PC is solid shape for about 3 years. My Dells last that long without a problem. So far this thing runs like a champ but what I hear about Gateway warranty mildly scares me.