The BEST Budget Laptop!
Written: Apr 18 '01
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Pros: Wonderful size! Sleek silver look. Many features built in. Hot battery swapping! Removeable HDD!
Cons: Runs hot after extended use (about 1.5-2 hours). Fan noisy.
The Bottom Line: Gives you EVERYTHING at the best price (if you can live with a little outdated processor and video).
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| qube's Full Review: Gateway Solo 3150 |
I bought this laptop off eBay for $700. It came with 333 Celeron, 96MB RAM, integrated 3COM 10/100, 56K modem, DVD... etc etc. You can get the specs elsewhere :) The battery life is wonderful! Just about 2.5 hours surfing the web, doing 'regular' work. My 'fireant' (Gateway codename) was upgraded to 20GB storage and 288MB of RAM and runs like a dream. Runs everything great from Macromedia Dreamweaver to Cold Fusion to Office 2000 to Photoshop 5.5 to The Sims to... you get the picture. My only peeve with this fella is it does run hot after a while. Case in point: The first time I got it, I formatted and installed Windows ME. During the middle, I left the system on my short pile rug (NOT A GOOD IDEA!) and when I got back to it in about 2 hours, it was BURNING hot! The screen (of course) flickered like MAD. Again, this is a very special case and should not happen to most users.
This baby is a dream machine for many many people. If you can pick up the PII 366 version, might be even better but the performance is not that much more. The Celeron 333 I have DOES have the L2 cache :) Sure, it may only have a stupid NeoMagic 2.5MB video, but this is a pure portable work (and limited fun) machine. I leave pure games to my 1.1 Athlon desktop. Last point: You've seen those portable DVD players that sell for about $800? This baby does DVDs with a 12" screen, S-video/RCA/digital audio/stereo audio for only $700! Beat that!
Final note: This guy also has WARM battery swapping -- a feature missing even in many of today's laptops.
Final final note: The PROs outweigh the CONs by far. I am typing it on the 3150 right now.
Final final final note: For those owning any of the Gateway 31xx series, email me and I'll show you how to software and hardware performance mod this baby to make it run like a 400-450 PII (no, not overclocking)! This beats the heck outta my Compaq 1694 600MHz DVD 14.1". I sold it for this :)
Okay, really last note: I solved the fan noise problem by taking it out and lubing it really well. Now it's near silent ;)
** ADDENDUM: This baby comes with the KingMax DVD card (hardware decoding) and just tried it today. It looks AWESOME with the s-video and AC3 audio out!
** ADDENDUM: successfully overclocked this fella 333 celery to a 375 celery and L2 latency setting to 3. this boosted performance by 22% tests show. email me if you want to know how.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 700
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 301-400
Screen Size: 12
RAM: More than 256
Internal Storage: DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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qube
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Reviews written: 1
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