Gateway P-171S FX preview.

[MSP]

Look what the UPS guy brought me today? First impressions:

Pros:
Very fast, Oblivion runs as well as it does on my C2D/Nvidia 8800GTS desktop.
Great screen! Big and beautiful, just like me.
Speakers sound surprisingly good, nice and loud compared to my Macbook.
Quiet and relatively cool.
The keyboard has a nice feel to it.
Fingerprint reader gives me geek street cred.
HDMI and ESATA ports.

Cons:
Windows Vista
Piano black finish is a fingerprint magnet.
Heavy as shit, north of 10 pounds.

Definitely a desktop replacement, see the photo comparing it's size to my Macbook! I'm pleased so far, but my opinion of Windows Vista hasn't changed. It's stable and seems fast, but I wish to Jah I could load XP.

[Sparky]

Not bad at all. That's the first laptop I've seen with an eSata port. Maybe that's because I'm just stuck in my little Apple world.

The orange around the keyboard looks awful in pictures, but I'm sure it looks better in person. I know a lot of people knock Gateway for all sorts of reasons, but our first real computer from 1999 was still running very well before I swapped it out for my old Athlon XP system. Take that DELL!

Just a quick question. Why do some manufacturers align the track pad to the left side of the laptop? To me that seems a bit counter-intuitive.

[MSP]

I thought the same thing about the track pad, but in practice it's just right. See, the laptop is so honking big that they could squeeze a numeric pad in. So with the pad to the left it aligns directly below the space bar.

And as for the copper accents, I could take or leave those. It kinda screams "Look at me!!!" But it's growing on me.

[Commissar Smersh]

That's no moon...

...it's a laptop!

[SoulAssassin]

My mom got an HP that's the same size. IT's the first time I've ever had to grab a laptop with two hands; I really thought I was going to drop it because of the width.

[Greatbam]

sweet laptop man. Makes me jealous but not too jealous because the parts for my new desktop come tomorrow.

[Torx]

wtf, gateway is still in business?

it looks nice man, but i dont know about gateway anymore

[MSP]

Gateway was either bought by or merged with Acer, so their laptops are actually pretty nice now. And a bargain since they're trying to increase their market share.

Still liking the laptop, and I'm learning to live with Vista better than I thought I would, but what is up with the file transfers? I tried copying about 80GB of data from either a 100Mbps Ethernet or via USB2, and it took something crazy like 4 hours. I had heard there was an issue with this, and holy shit was that right! I haven't installed SP1 yet, I'm hoping it helps.

[SoulAssassin]

SP1 helps that by 50% allegedly. I know it's improved but I don't know by how much in real world examples.

[MSP]

The other thing about this laptop that I'd put in the "con" column is all the damn trial software and crap Gateway loaded on the thing. I'm not exaggerating here, I spent an hour removing and cleaning up. AOL, NetZero, Norton Anti-Virus, Napster, Google Desktop, trials for all sorts of crap I've never heard of. The length of icons in my task bar was about 5 inches long before I got started...

[MSP]

That's no moon...

...it's a laptop!

That cracked me up. But yeah, the damn thing barely fits in my laptop bag AFTER I pulled out the foam pads on the sides.

[sims]

color scheme looks cheezy to me, but whatever :P

why can't you just format it and put XP on?

[MSP]

There aren't XP drivers for everything.

[krod]

cool, what are the specs? I'm still mulling my decision on my Alienware purchase and looking for alternatives.

[MSP]

cool, what are the specs? I'm still mulling my decision on my Alienware purchase and looking for alternatives.

All for $1280, simply amazing. I added a 3 year warranty for $150 just to hedge the bet.

Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor T7250 (2.00GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 Cache)
Windows Vista® Home Premium (32-bit)
3072MB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM (1-1024MB & 1-2048 MB module)
250GB 5400rpm Serial ATA hard drive w/ 8MB cache
8x Multi-Format Dual Layer Slot Load DVD-RW w/ DVD-RAM
NVIDIA® GeForce® Go 8800GTS with 512MB of GDDR3
Intel® PM965 Chipset
17.0" WXGA+ Ultrabright TFT Active Matrix (1440 x 900 max. resolution)
Integrated 1.3 Megapixel Web Cam
Integrated Intel® 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N Wireless Networking
Fingerprint Reader

[krod]

1280 bucks? Holy crap what am I doing?! Are you having any probs with 8800 downclocking because of heat? It's a big prob with alienware, they are sending new bios out to customers to try and fix it. Just more delays for me.

[MSP]

No problems as far as I can tell - cool and quiet, and 2 hours of battery life under load.

Last night I slapped a 60GB SATA drive in the empty bay for backups of my data. It'll do until I can get something bigger. I'm trying out the SpareBackup software that Gateway included with the laptop, so far so good.

[jake]

Look what the UPS guy brought me today? First impressions:

Pros:
Very fast, Oblivion runs as well as it does on my C2D/Nvidia 8800GTS desktop.
Great screen! Big and beautiful, just like me.
Speakers sound surprisingly good, nice and loud compared to my Macbook.
Quiet and relatively cool.
The keyboard has a nice feel to it.
Fingerprint reader gives me geek street cred.
HDMI and ESATA ports.

Cons:
Windows Vista
Piano black finish is a fingerprint magnet.
Heavy as shit, north of 10 pounds.
Its a gateway.

fixed. Why so many computers MSP? Need to do some gaming on the road?

[namelessentity]

He's replacing his desktop and he sold the Mac he had as far as I know.

[MSP]

My needs changed and I needed more muscle. So I gave the Macbook to my wife since she had been drooling over it. Her desktop will be retired, and my desktop will go the daughter. And my daughter's old desktop will go to grandma. Believe it or not it was just time for a new machine. Having to keep all these machines up-to-date means I replace about one a year.

But yeah, it being a Gateway is a "con". I wouldn't have bought it without the extended warranty, I'll say that for sure. But I've worked on literally hundreds of Gateway desktops and laptops and only a handful have been turds. Besides, as Krod can tell you the next laptop with these specs costs a full $1,000 more. I could almost buy two for what the Dell XPS 1730 or Alienware would have cost me. And those aren't without their problems.