Gateway is one of those names that people either hate or love. I've found that there is little middle ground. My review of the Solo 9300 will explain a little of each - hate and love - that I've experienced in the first week of owning this system.

LOVE: I'm an intense geek that loves lots of desktop space. I've been waiting for YEARS for someone to finally come out with a 1280x1024 laptop display that isn't $12,000. Gateway's 15.7" display is fabulous! Most 17" monitors have somewhere in the 15.4" - 16" viewable display area, so having this laptop is just like having a 17" monitor with you all the time. Even at lower resolutions, you don't get that HV expansion garbage that can happen on a lot of laptops. They fill in the "gaps" and make all resolutions look relatively nice. It's almost as if they're a bit fuzzy, but it sure as heck beats the stair-stepped text that's hard to read.

HATE: I can't write to the boot sector of the drive without manually partitioning the drive which makes dual-booting operating systems quite difficult. If I use a disk editor, I can get around it, but it's still quite annoying.

HATE: Don't EVER tell Gateway's Tech Support you've done ANYTHING to their system. Note I say THEIR system. They have this mentality that the system still belongs to them and how dare you mess with it. Don't even tell them you powered it on... it might "void the warranty". I was actually told by support that using their included restoration CDs violated the warranty because "we didn't tell you to do that". Yes... I'm serious. Just try it Gateway! I paid an extra $100 for a HARDWARE warranty, so don't threaten me with something that won't hold up in court, Gateway!

As soon as the unit arrived, I had problems from the start. I couldn't install software from the DVD-ROM drive without errors and hard system hangs. Getting through support was a nightmare. I finally had to go through an "insider" to pull some strings in getting a hard drive overnighted to me. I generally felt like I was just being shuffled off the phone by the two different tech support reps I was forced to deal with. This isn't the only time I've had such experiences with Gateway's support, so know that going in.

Their standard practice is 3-5 business days to get a new part. EVERY other major PC manufacturer is standard overnight or 2nd day shipment of replacement parts. What I'm curious about is if using their restore CDs without an act of congress violates their warranty, shouldn't ripping open the system to replace a hard drive myself do the same? Thought to ponder I guess... As for the hard drive failure, it's an IBM Travelstar hard drive, so I can't blame Gateway for the bad hardware unless they didn't test it thoroughly on their end prior to sending it out, and there's no way I can prove either way.

LOVE: The overall driver quality is above average for a new model of laptop. The DVD software that's included is WinDVD, which works well. They have a few features disabled in the OEM version, which is a very minor disappointment because they make a docking station available in which cards could be installed to take advantage of the "extras". It really doesn't bother me though, I won't be buying a docking station.

LOVE: PIII 750MHz. It does actually perform too! The Speed-Step technology throttles the processor on battery power which lengthens the time without being plugged into power. Being that laptops don't typically tap the full potential of a processor, the general consumer can probably save a few bucks and go with the 700MHz or 650MHz and not notice much of a difference.

LOVE: The number of features crammed into the laptop is nearly unmatched by any other manufacturer. Serial, Parallel, VGA, PS/2, 2 USB ports, Firewire, video out AND video capture, 20/30/40GB hard disks, RAM expandability, DVD or CDRW drive, quick launch keyboard buttons, 56Kbps modem, line in/out & Mic jacks, decent speakers, front-side DVD/CD play controls w/lockout, and 2 PC Card slots are all included.

The only features that are noticeably missing are integrated 10/100 Ethernet and Infrared. There is a spot for the infrared port, bit it's not there... can't figure that one out. As for Ethernet, no big deal, I'd probably use my own card, which I'm going to assume they figured most would do anyway, so why bother including the 10/100 NIC.

HATE: Windows Protection Error on shutdown. Norton Anti-Virus is known for doing this when the "scan floppy on shutdown" option is enabled on laptops, yet their scripted installation enabled that option. Boneheads!

HATE: Can't use the Hibernate feature of Windows ME because of the video capture driver that is not compatible with the Hibernate mode.

So, that's 4 LOVEs and 4 HATEs that come immediately to mind. Of the negative items, only the tech support sticks out in my mind as something that might make me reconsider the purchase if I had to do it again. The price was the big thing that made me go with Gateway. There are a couple of other manufacturers that do the 1280x1024 displays, but they're as much as 30% higher in price and fewer overall features. Being a professional geek, I can work my way around some problems that crop up. Not everyone can or is willing to.

If you like a feature packed laptop that looks great and overall works well for 90% of users, this is the cheapest option out there. I'm still going to give the unit 4 stars because I do like it. 3 stars would mean I could go either way, but I can't see trading this laptop for anything else at this point, so I'm leaning toward the LOVE end of things a bit.

I'll part with this final note... I've noted that I've been waiting for a 1280x1024 laptop for years, but I've also been waiting for a reasonably priced laptop that includes SCSI hard disks. SCSI outperforms ATA/IDE by a VERY significant amount. The IBM Travelstar hard drives rotate at 4,200rpm in the interest of heat generation, space savings, and reliability in potentially unstable environments. You'll notice performance glitches in the system when installing software, or running multimedia from the hard drive and particularly from the DVD/CD drive because of the CPU intensive nature of ATA/IDE. The first manufacturer to overcome this limitation in a laptop that's this feature-packed will earn my business.

-Furo

Randall S. Nieland
furo@furo.com
http://www.furo.com



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 3700
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 701-800
Screen Size: Greater than 15"
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 21-30