Just finished the day with the Gateway 14, one of the most talked about laptops in the affordable Windows space. I am very impressed.
We bought it at Walmart for $279 (2 generations old, discounted from $360). That’s right, the lid has the legendary cow spot. His 1990s Gateway brand, which everyone knows and loves, is now licensed by Acer and is an exclusive brand of Walmart. A cow roars. Moo.
The model I’m using includes the Intel Core i5-1135G7 (the chip that powers many of the most premium ultraportable devices of 2020, including the Samsung Galaxy Book, Acer Swift 5, Dell XPS 13, and Lenovo Yoga 9i) contained. RAM is 16GB, storage is 512GB. At $279, it’s a very solid deal and probably close to the best specs you can get for that price. increase.
The chassis is the sturdiest and best-built we’ve ever seen in a Windows laptop, with no flexing on the keyboard or screen, and no impressive fingerprint removal. There’s even an empty drive slot on the bottom ( two screws), allowing you to install as much storage as you need. Oh, and it’s blue. Blue! how fun is that? Gateway also put little Microsoft and Intel stickers on the bottom of the device, so the palm rest is a perfectly untarnished blue. A bold and lovely look. approve.
I opened the gateway before 9:00 am to start work. It was shipped with real Windows, not S mode.I soon realized that there was many Although pre-installed.Some were useful — I didn’t need to download Spotify! — but there were also games like solitaire pinned to the taskbar and backends for browser games like Forge of Empires and Elvenal on your desktop. In the name of Marie Kondo, we have cleared it all.
The morning and afternoon were uneventful. I spent most of my time writing in Chrome, with about a dozen tabs open and the occasional Spotify streaming in the background. It seemed a bit late at first, apparently because it really needed an update (the unit had been sitting in our review closet for a while since we bought it). I procrastinate like that, so I tried to put this off, but the device eventually took the problem into its own hands.It would freeze, crash, and start updating itself. is. i think i deserve it.
Once the updates were sorted out, work resumed.Dear readers, the gateway is fastI sailed all day without breaking a sweat. He didn’t hear a single decibel of fan noise. When I put my ear close to the keyboard, I could hear a faint bit of coil whine, but that was it. Performance was noticeably smoother and faster than his slightly more expensive HP 14 unit with a weaker processor and a quarter of the Gateway’s RAM. I also kind of like the Gateway’s 1920 x 1080 screen, which gives it a slightly more modern look. I was working indoors without glare at 20-30% brightness.
The audio was small, the percussion was weak, and there was no bass, but it was reasonably loud and certainly sounded better than the HP 14. The mic, on the other hand, works, but it wasn’t very good. Tested.upon The Bargecast (In a highly unfavorable environment, to be sure), check out that episode to hear first-hand what they sound like.
Start the day with your Gateway fully charged. largely Spent the whole day unplugged and died in the late afternoon around 7 1/2 hours. It’s definitely better than the HP 14 and quite a few expensive Windows laptops I’ve tested recently. I’ll take it.
After-work activities were the ultimate test for Gateway. I spent the night working on the manuscript and researching potential agents to submit it. A list of different institutions, their requirements, blogs, etc. I was resizing, swapping, clicking, and taking them all out very often. fast. No problem with the gateway passing through everything.
I also had a lot of my Google docs open, including the well over 300 pages of the manuscript itself. A document file of this size is very unwieldy and will speed up very quickly, so be careful with the computer you open this document on. This was no problem for the Gateway 14 either. The Gateway 14 loads everything as fast as any Windows computer I’ve ever used, and it never freezes or lags while editing.
The Gateway’s keyboard doesn’t have a backlight, but I had no problem working late at night with the lights dimmed. The bright white text against the dark black keys provided enough contrast to make sense of what I needed in the dark. I much prefer the experience (which you often get if you buy a backlit device in this price range).
Now, there is one serious drawback. bottom hold me. This is he one of the worst touchpads I have ever used. Size doesn’t matter. It feels like it has more headroom than the smaller HP 14. However, it is very difficult to click.you really have to poke stuff down. It’s pretty annoying and annoying. Also, I’m not sure what the actuation point is, but when I clicked on a certain area at a certain angle, it sometimes felt like I was clicking multiple times.
But the most annoying thing is that click and drag doesn’t work at all. There appeared to be a hard upper limit to how much text could be highlighted before the touchpad decided it was done. It also took many tries to highlight as click-and-drag attempts. TRUE Ruined my manuscript editing process.
Now, on a slightly more expensive laptop, this issue is enough to lower Gateway’s score. It’s a little forgiving because it plugs in easily. In particular, the fact that there are USB-A ports on each side makes it very convenient to plug in peripherals regardless of which hand you use the mouse with. We won’t use any peripherals in our review of the laptop, but you should plan on keeping a mouse handy if you buy this. -C, Micro SD (!), and a headphone jack. )
Given the fact that my two biggest problems, the touchpad and microphone, can both be solved with external peripherals, I didn’t have much to complain about here. If you don’t already own a mouse or mic and need to purchase one, this device may lose some value. All too often), I really think this is one of the best deals you can find on a Windows laptop. Plus, it’s blue! Did I mention it’s blue?
I’m very serious when I say that I’m actually considering buying one of these for myself.
