Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good!
Comment: To make it short this computer is great and very fast and has lots of memory and 64bit windows Vista Intel Core 2 Quad the best stuff!
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Good value
Comment: This is a fast computer - I use it for the typical stuff - Office, email, photos, videos - and it is quick and agile. Vista feels as good on this machine as OS X on a recent Mac laptop I bought (for three times as much).
I'm using my old dell monitor and wireless keyboard/mouse and all worked right off the bat without configuration.
Unit seems solidly built.
Picking up on the other post, the fan sounds pretty comparable to me to my old Dell. Not a big deal but definitely not absolutely silent.
My two (minor) complaints? First, would like more USB ports on the front panel. I'd put the firewire port on the front rather than the rear, but that's more minor. Second, would put the DVD player above the USB ports to get the cables out of the way of the drawer when it is open.
All in all, I think this is the best mid to upper workhorse out there - and I did shop the Dells (more expensive for less) and the HP (also good, but tend to be a bit larded up with multimedia stuff that is only useful if you watch TV on your pc, which is not something I do or intend to).
Other than Norton 360, which you can uninstall, the bloatware factor seems pretty low compared to previous purchases I've made from Dell (and Gateway in the old dayts).
Customer Rating:
Summary: Gateway-the Ebola virus of computers.
Comment: We bought a Gateway desktop and Windows got hosed for some reason. We called 1-800-GATEWAY for support. Guess what? If you buy a Gateway anywhere but their website you must call a separate toll number. WTF!? Then we needed to restore it but the restore partition was bad. Had to get the recovery disk. They charged me $20 for a $1 CD-R. Then it wouldn't work, and they wanted to charge me to tell me how to use it. Again WTF? These people are horrible. Save yourself a lot of trouble and get a Mac. Anything but Gateway.
Customer Rating:
Summary: So far - very nice.
Comment: Pros:
Very powerful computer, the 4 cores with the huge memory quickly chew up whatever you throw at them.
Vista 64 not as big a compatibility issue as I feared, so far I have most of my previous environment working.
Box contains a DVD with Vista-64 SP1. This is becoming more and more rare these days (a bad thing). To me this is very important in case of disk-crash, I don't want to start downloading huge amounts of SW from Microsoft if and when the disk decides to quit.
The video quality of the ATI GPU is superior to any built-in graphics. Note that I am talking about clarity and quality of the picture here (not speed). The same 19-inch Dell LCD connected to this computer was previously connected to a Dell with built-in Intel graphics and that provided a noticably inferior picture quality. I have not really tested GPU speed yet.
Not too much bloatware.
400 Watt power supply - more than the standard pre-built box, hopefully leaves some room for expansion.
Seems solidly built, esthetically pleasing.
Wireless (a must these days) works well, so does the Gigabit wired Ethernet card.
Cons:
Not as quiet as I expected, GPU fan is quite audible in a quiet setting.
Norton 360 trial is a major pain constantly popping up all kind of noises.
I have seen some issues with the ATI GPU which have me a bit worried (1-second black screen flash), I am still troubleshooting this phenomena.
Only one Firewire port - on the back.
Summary:
For the price, which is what you would pay for a middling laptop, you get a lot of bang for your buck.
Longevity: I expect this computer with Vista 64, 4 cores and 6GB RAM to be a valid and relevant work-station for a relatively long time.
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