7422GX - Awesome Video Editing

I am a wedding photographer/video-guy and did tons of research before buying a notebook for my business. It had to have a nice big glossy screen on which to show my photos. I needed decent battery life. I had to have a card reader (although they are not that expensive to add, I wanted one built in since I "harvest" amateur digital photos for the couple. Most of all, I wanted it to be very fast with a lot of RAM for editing photos and rendering video. After stumbling a bit at first with cracked hinges and a faulty video card, I am happy to say that I could not be more pleased. After picking up a wireless mouse, I have edited thousands of photos in Paint Shop Pro, and am able to open at least 30 big digital files before it even hints at choking. I have edited large video project, and the Studio DV program I use, which is really pretty buggy on my Sony Vaio desktop, has been rock solid on my Gateway. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it renderers video noticeably quicker on the Gateway, than on my Vaio 2.8 with 1G RAM - I expected the P4 Vaio to have the edge, but no. Also, I have burned dozens of DVDs and CDs with very very few problems. The battery life has been around 2 hours, which is really just fine - I have not needed more than that. I have also been very impressed by the audio - after some tweaking of the EQ, it is clear, and can be made very loud - surprisingly powerful for such tiny speakers.

In a word, my Gateway 7422GX has been AWESOME.

I did purchase (and would recommend) the Best Buy extended warranty. While I have always been skeptical of extended warranties, and in fact, this is the first I have ever bought, it allows you to just drop off the computer with the Geek Squad guys and let them deal with Gateway. I have already had it shipped back to Gateway twice, so I am reasonably confident that at some time in the future, it will be a lemon, and then they can give me something new – even if it doesn’t break again, it is nice to know that it is covered.