Laptops Arena

I have to admit, it’s been a while since I heard anything about the Gateway laptop manufacturer and new Gateway laptops. One of the new Gateway laptops I know is in fact about one year old and the model is called Gateway NV5213u. This laptop has drawn my attention because of its $529 price which seems excellent for the specs of this unit.



This unit is powered by a 2.1 GHz AMD Athlon 64 X2 QL-64 and 4 GB of RAM. The combination between these 2 components can handle multitasking at a great speed and without affecting the overall performance of the unit. The total storage capacity of the hard disk is 320 GB which is more than enough room for file storage. The 15.6 inch display comes in a native resolution of 1366 x 768 and the screen is quite decent when it comes to quality. The glossy coating of the display provides colors full of vitality and this eventually leads to a much better image. The speakers are quite average and even if the lack of bass is highly noticeable, the speakers still produce quality sound and can be heard from all across a small room. To fill bigger rooms, you will need a pair of external speakers. It is not frequent that we find numerical key pads on 15 inch laptops. If you notice that the keyboard was stretched all the way to the edges of the notebook, it is easy to understand how a numerical pad could have fit in there.



The keyboard feels very comfortable to type on without registering any flex. The touchpad of this Gateway laptop is very responsive and will register a very small amount of lag. The left and right mouse buttons are in fact one single bar which has to be pressed on the left and right edges in order to trigger the proper commands.



The Gateway NV5213u comes with 4 USB ports, one SDHC card reader, a modem port, an Ethernet port, a HDMI port, one VGA out and the regular headphones out and microphone in jacks. Some people will miss the FireWire port even if personally I  don’t find it quite essential for a laptop and I would trade it in anytime for a HDMI port. The battery life of this Gateway laptop was quite ok compared to the scores and performance of other 15 inch laptop batteries. With the display brightness set to 70%, the wireless connection activated and the Windows Vista power management profile set to “balanced mode” this laptop managed to stay uo and running for about 3 hours and 30 minutes, which is more than I can say even for my very own 15.4 inch laptop. With an elegant design and good specs, this Gateway laptop is quite a great idea for a budget notebook. The battery life is decent even if the weight may be a burden standing between you and portability. The integrated ATI HD3200 graphics card will not allow you to play top of the line games but it does allow some softer game play.