What?

My thoughts on gateway from general experiences with them both at work and at home:

Never seen computers with more problems (faulty hardware) out of the box. But they have pretty decent customer support, and their service centers will replace any defective parts and send it back ultra quick.

This applies to their laptops too. When I first received my laptop it would make a loud grinding sound any time I tried to play any graphics intensive games (I'm thinking some kind of cooling device for the video hardware, but it was still under waranty so I was too lazy to find out).

I called them, told them what was going on and that I'd like to have it looked at and serviced. Got a box in the mail 2 days later, sent it, got the laptop back 5 days later, no problems whatsoever.

Have had similar issues with several workstations at work.

Overall I'm happy with Gateway.

Here's an alternative:

Base laptop: $1099
Add modem: $49 (only if needed)
2 GB memory: $82 (after rebate)
120 GB hard drive: $71
Total: $1301

Advantages
- $71 cheaper
- Sell the original hard drive and memory to save even more
- More compact / easier to carry
- 100 MHz faster
- Built-in camera
- 802.11N wireless
- Gigabit ethernet
- DVI out
- Optical audio out
- Bluetooth
- IR remote control
- Spend your savings and run Linux, Windows, and OS X concurrently
- No Vista ;)
- Included software: create/edit movies, DVDs, music, photos...

Disadvantages
- Smaller screen (but same resolution)
- No PC card slot (you don't need it, do you?)
- No card reader (buy a USB reader if you need one, cheap)
- Only CD burner (DVD-ROM only)
- Integrated graphics (only matters for high end games)

The only crappy thing is the CD burner instead of DVD. If you want that, add $200 and get:
- 2 GHz - even faster
- Bigger memory + hard drive to sell
- Double layer DVD burner

If you plan to do high end games, wait for the Santa Rosa version to come out with the Intel X3100 graphics which is supposed to be a huge step above GMA950.

Just something to consider.

Flame Sage wrote:

(BTW: what's up with this 'Santa Rosa' thing?]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Centrino#Santa_Rosa_platform_.282007.29

All notebook manufacturers are expected to adopt the new chipset over the next month or two.

No, it's the entire platform. As the link given below says, it includes: 2nd generation Core 2 Duo processors, 800 MHz front side bus with dynamic switching, GMA X3000 integrated graphics, flash memory caching, EFI, and dynamic acceleration technology which shuts off one core and overclocks the other when needed for single-threaded apps.

Even though the CPU clock speeds of the new Core 2 Duos will only be marginally faster, Santa Rosa as a whole contains some pretty significant upgrades over Napa, its predecessor (used in all current Core 2 Duo laptops). Regardless of what company you go with, it's probably worth waiting a few weeks to a month for them to update to Santa Rosa.