She's Slim & Sexy, I'm Typing On Her Right Now... (Gateway Solo 9300)

Member Name: sfarmer76

Product:	Gateway Solo 9300
Date:	01/03/02 (1477 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great Value

Disadvantages: Floppy Drive Testy

The Gateway Solo 9300 CL is an outstanding notebook computer, and a good value for the money. It has a Pentium III 650 Mhz, and a fair amount of ram, although I increased the ram on mine to 160. I like the fact that the CL has a battery life of nearly five hours.

Mine has a large 15" TFT (thin film transistor) screen which is well lit and looks great from any angle, and it's the perfect fit for watching those DVD movies on a long layover in a boring airport. The built in speakers are quite adequate for a laptop, but I prefer to use mine with a headset plugged into the headphone jack. The touchpad is easy to use, and great to navigate with. It has two buttons below it, but why use the buttons when you can quietly tap the touchpad and elicit the same result?

I use my laptop a lot, especially for Internet and word-processing. This laptop is perfect for that. The layout of the keyboard is a little scrunched up, but the empty area at the bottom of the form factor makes a good hand-rest.Mine also came with the extra handy Gateway GoBack software... if you encounter something such as a fatal exception error or install something and it screws up your computers settings, you can go back to the way it was previously set simply by holding down the space bar during the boot-up.

After using it four or five hours in a row, the laptop has the tendency to get very warm, just short of hot in fact - but this has not concerned me much so far. If you're a hardcore gamer or a graphics pro this computer can handle a lot - but it's probably not the one for you.. look at the Solo 9300 XL instead. However, if you're a regular home user or a business person, this is the notebook you want!

A few other things I also added to round out my purchase were the Kensington Casual Carrying Case, the APC PNote Pro Surge Protector, and the HP PhotoSmart P1000 Printer. I wrote a separate review about the photo-quality printer.

Summary: