Gateway CX210XSo I am writing this review on my new Gateway CX210X. I am actually writing and we'll see how well it converts to text later. First let me talk about the specs. I upgraded it to a T7200 Core 2 Duo processor, 2 Gb RAM, 80 Gb 7200 RPM HD, DVD burner, built in WiFi, Bluetooth, 12 cell battery, and dedicated ATI X1400 graphics. With all of the upgrades, tax, shipping and discounts it came in at around $1900. It also came with Vista Home Premium installed.
One of the first things I did was run windows update. Out of the box it required 5 updates. The next thing to do was to uninstall some of the software that came preinstalled. I have heard horror stories about PCs with many many “craplets” installed and the pain in uninstalling them but the Gateway was not that bad. I only had to remove McAfee, AOL, and an EBay link. I left some things on including a program called BigFix which is supposed to automatically get updates for you. I then installed the Microsoft Experience Pack for Vista, AVG antivirus, and Firefox.
After getting everything set up I ran the windows experience test. Here are the scores:
Processor 4.9
Memory 4.5
Graphics 3.7
Gaming graphics 3.6
Primary had disk 4.8
The resulting score is 3.6. This seems to be enough to run Aero and everything.
I upgraded the battery to the 12 cell. This makes the computer pretty heavy but the battery life is nice. With heavy web surfing over WiFi I get 4+ hours of battery life. The battery extends below the computer providing a nice hand grip.
There are a couple of things about the layout that bother me a little bit. For instance, the CPU vent is located on the right side. When in tablet mode I like to hold it so the vent is on top to get better air flow. This orientation puts the battery on the left side which prevents it from being used as a nice grip for right handed people.
The laptop came with Microsoft Journal and OneNote. Both programs allow writing on the screen with the pen. When I first started writing there was a strange cursor flaw. In any screen orientation besides primary landscape, the cursor would change to a 1/2 inch black square. I also read reports of this online. Luckily, a couple of days after receiving the laptop a new ATI driver was released on the Gateway website that appears to have fixed the issue. Okay, back to writing. Using Journal to take notes on the screen is easy and effective. The pen writes smoothly and it is nice to be able to include drawings with the notes. This is a great program if you want to leave the notes as writing. It is a little more difficult when converting to text. I wrote the first 2 paragraphs of this review and then converted to text and it was full of errors. This is probably a result of my messy hand writing because when I wrote better it was more accurate. That’s nice and all but if I have to worry about making my writing neat I would rather just leave it as writing and not convert it.
Another tool for using the pen is the Tablet Input Panel (TIP). This is a floating window that normally sits off the left side of the screen, almost completely hidden. When the pen is moved near the TIP is shoots over to the center of the screen revealing a writing surface. This is where you write short things like web addresses, usernames, and passwords. The hand writing recognition is pretty good here and I think it gets better over time. Things like web addresses are not in the dictionary but I think Vista learns what you have written and gets better at recognizing it. (There is an extension called GeckoTIP to better integrate the TIP with Firefox but it doesn’t work perfectly with Vista yet.)
So far I am really happy with the Gateway CX210X. With all of the upgrades it is a pretty powerful machine. Soon I’ll try converting movies to DivX to really test it out. It won’t be a real gaming machine but that’s not what I wanted. The added tablet functionality is convenient, effective, and fun. If you want to know more about tablets I have found the following websites have a lot of information.
tabletpcreview.com Active forums with users of all types of tablets.
jkontherun.blogs.com/jkontherun/ Nice blog about mobile technology.
gottabemobile.com Similar to jkontherun.
I hope you found this review helpful. If you have any questions feel free to
email me.