Gary BUTTERWORTH Online

STRATFORD, NJ, USA

It’s hard to believe, but this time last week I was in Delaware for Dan’s wedding! 

As I mentioned, it was a really fun time.  And, like usual, the week after a fun time seems to be a rough week here at my grandmom’s.  Even after being here for over 10 months, it doesn’t take me long at all to get out of my routine of nanasitting, and then it takes me a while to get back into it.  In the mean time, I struggle.  That’s why, in a way, I dread fun times–I know reality will come back to bite me soon afterwards.

This week was mostly the same, but not entirely: I certainly had a rough week of readjusting after 4 days of fun.  But, almost paradoxically, the week also seemed to fly by.

I think that might be because of my new toy.

Gateway ML3109 Laptop

My old Dell Inspiron 8100 bit the dust over 18 months ago.  My original plan was to wait until Windows Vista was released, and then replace my Inspiron with a similiar mid-range Vista laptop, or maybe even go top-of-the-line.  In the mean time, I hooked up an old desktop, and I made do with that.  But honestly, it was starting to get old.

Vista was supposed to be the second coming of Windows XP, but the more I read about it, the more I got the impression that it was the second coming of Windows Me.  In fact, lots of laptop-buyers are still “downgrading” to XP, while others are embracing Vista.  Wanting to make a purchase that would be stable from the beginning but also last for a while, I held off making a buy until I could decide what OS I wanted. 
(Yes, I did consider a MacBook, too, since I’m a big fan of Final Cut Pro.  I may get one one day, but they are just SO expensive, and I’m still not entirely comfortable with the OS.  Plus, I’ve had bad luck with Macs at work.)

I’d say I’m in the top 20% or so of computer users.  I’m no expert, but I’m ok.  In college, I was the guy whose dorm room people knocked on with their computer problems…when the “computer guy” wasn’t around. 
Anyway, I’d consider myself a fairly educated consumer, but I still had a hard time deciding between XP and Vista, and a few other things:

• Widescreen vs. Standard (I’m not really a fan of widescreens, especially on TV, but on a computer I see less difference than I expected.)
• Glossy vs. non-glossy screen (I certainly prefer the matte, but the gloss isn’t nearly as bad as I feared)
• Video card (or, more precisely, do I want to edit video on this thing or not?)
• How important is S-video out? 
• How much should I spend?

So, with an old desktop meeting my needs and with questions on my mind, I kept my eyes on the PC market, but I wasn’t in a rush to buy.

The one thing I knew for sure was that I wanted something lightweight, and I was willing to pay for it.  My old Inspiron was a brick, and that’s not what I want in a laptop (I can’t believe people actually buy those 17″ behemoths they sell nowadays!).  In addition to cutting down your mobility, a bulky laptop is a bigger target for bumps and knocks, and that’s what did my Inspiron in.

I came VERY close to buying the Lenovo Thinkpad T61 about 2 weeks ago.  As far as laptops go, it’s close to being the very top of the line.  But in the end, I decided that I didn’t want to spend that much and not have S-video out.  (I think I’m probably the only one who appreciates that feature, which is probably why you don’t see it all the time.)

The new Dell Vostro 1400 definitely caught my eye, too.  But I had heard some negative reports about the build quality and size/weight, and I wanted to see one in person before going that route. 
And, of course, I kept my eyes peel for pretty much everything else, too.

After I got back from the wedding on Sunday, I noticed that Best Buy was running a sale on the Gateway M3109 for $350.  So, I bought one.

Pros 

Normally, I’m not too interested in the super-cheapies. 
They are usually big and bulky and cheap-looking.  But I went to Best Buy to look, and this one wasn’t.  It has a 14.1″ screen–the cheapies are usually about 15.1″, and bigger isn’t always better.  It’s only about an inch and a half thick, and it’s nice and lightweight.  I have my mobility!
While it’s not a Thinkpad, it is well put together, and it doesn’t look cheap at all; it looks like a $900 laptop.  It’s also extremely quiet and very cool.  I’ve had this thing on my lap for hours and it’s barely even warm, let alone hot!

I haven’t really tested the battery life yet, but seems pretty good.

The media card reader is a nice plus, too.

Cons and Upgrades

That said, it’s obviously not perfect.
It was SLOW out of the box, for sure; the fact that Gateway sells this thing with Vista and only 512MB of RAM is a friggin’ crime, especially when a good chunk of that RAM is shared with video.  Even the Vista Home Basic it comes with is too memory-hungry for the out-of-box configuration.

The first thing I did was configure it the close to the way BlkViper suggests. After I turned off most of Windows’ graphical features and cleaned out the startup programs with MSConfig, it was humming along pretty nicely.
I’d say this is the minimum you need to do for this computer. Doing just that, it’s actually pretty decent.  But you really should do a little more.

(My grandkids will make fun of me one day for turning off all sorts of graphical stuff to get a little bump in performance.  haha.)

I added 1GB of RAM ($35 shipped from NewEgg), bringing it to 1.5GB, and that made a HUGE difference.  I also allocated 128MB to video in the BIOS, and did a reformat and clean install of Vista (surprisingly fast to do), and right now, I’m very happy with it.
(I almost didn’t bother with the clean install of Vista, and I didn’t really need to, but I’m glad I did.  The bloatware wasn’t too intrusive, but it was there nonetheless.)

Obviously, it’s not a computer for power-users (Celeron M 1.6 GHz), but many people vastly overestimate the amount of power they will actually need.  If you’re not a gamer, you really don’t need all that much processing power.  I mean, before I got this, I could listen to music, edit photos, chat, and surf all at the same time on an old 733MHz Pentium running Windows ME!  And this is a huge step up from there.

Other problems: I don’t like where the left control key is placed, and there’s a tiny bit of a lag in opening some documents, I think due to HD speed.  The built-in speakers are mediocre, but that goes for most laptops.  The lack of a built-in microphone sucks just a little (and is an odd thing to leave off).  There’s no DVD burner, but I have an external HD, so no worries there.  It burns CDs, anyway.

Verdict

I installed OpenOffice.org, the GIMP, and a some other free software, and I have a fully-functional PC for 400 bucks! 

If I can find my disk, I might install Ubuntu, too, just for the hell of it.

All in all, it might have been a little bit of an impulse buy, but not really.  I had been in the market for a laptop for a while, and this certainly fit my needs, so I pounced on it.  It does 85% of what I wanted to do for about 35% of what I wanted to spend–that’s what I call a value. 

I also like the fact that, at this price, I don’t have to worry too much if something happens to it.  Whenever I finish watching my grandmom full-time, I plan on travelling.  This is the kind of laptop I can travel with, but not stress out about if it gets lost, stolen, or broken while on the road.

I might decide to an upgrade to a better computer a year from now (Quad Core?), or maybe even six months from now.  Or maybe not.  Either way, I expect to keep this on hand for a while, either as a primary or secondary computer.  And I think I’m going to be very happy with it.

This laptop meets my needs, and for $350, it’s a great value.  Just make sure you either upgrade the RAM or install a less-hungry OS.

UPDATE (9/28/07)

Believe it or not, this has proven to be one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written (probably because so many people took advantage of the great Best Buy deal).  So, since it’s getting a fair amount of attention, I thought I’d post a real short update, now that I’ve had this computer for nearly two weeks. 

At this point, pretty much everything I’ve written above still stands. 
I’m still very happy with this computer for the price.  The delay in starting office documents is probably my biggest pet peeve.  I’m not sure if that’s because of the slow HD, the processor, or just a quirk in OpenOffice.org (it’s my first time using this office suite). 

I still hope to make this a dual-boot machine with Ubuntu Linux, but rumor has it that it’s currently next to impossible to get the sound and wireless internet working with it.  Hopefully that will get resolved, and I’ll be able to play around with it.

I am not particularly fond of Windows Vista.  It has some very nice new features, for sure (I especially like the focus on metadata).  But this system still seems to lock up on me once or twice a day; sometimes the task manager won’t even open!  It’s less stable than XP, for sure.  Also, I just don’t understand why it needs SO much memory. 
It’s not terrible, and I’m sure it’ll get better once SP1 comes out.  But, for now, I miss XP.

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Link du jour:  If you haven’t watched  South Jersey’s Nitro Girl on Colbert yet, you really should!