My first laptop - Gateway NV5207u

Since I was looking around for my first laptop I was trying to make a good decision so I thought I would get a mac. With experience with them at my vo. tech. school I thought it would be a good idea but then bad stuff happened and I had to get a pc. It has a 2.1ghz AMD Athlon X2 processor, ATI radeon 3200HD graphics and broadcom wireless (chip?) I got it at BestBuy and my experience with it so far has been both good and bad. So, I'll throw in a little bit of a review and say what I like and dislike about this machine.



First off – the screen. It's 15.6”, 16:9 ratio and definitely isn't the best in the world. I think the term is “stairstepping” when the screen can't reproduce colors in a gradient it looks blocky. It's very obvious when booting into Ubuntu Karmic. Horizontal viewing angles are fine but vertical...I just cannot find a sweet spot. It seems like there is always a part of the screen that is discolored or washed out.


The keyboard is by far my favorite part, I think it has chicklet keys. At first it was hard to type on being that I never used laptops often. It feels so nice to type on now I find it hard to type on desktop keyboards anymore. The touch-sensitive keys above the keyboard are nice. They worked flawless at first and now the mute doesn't light up and none of the icons on the screen show when you press a key, other than that they're fine.


The trackpad in my opinion is the worst I have ever used. There are times where the mouse doesn't want to move even though I'm moving my finger all over the place. Even though it has gestures, to put it nicely, they all suck.
One finger scroll – vertical works alright but horizontal worked for literally ½ a second and never again
Two finger scrolling – *phbbtt*
two finger navigation – I never have it on when I'm browsing the web
rotation – I managed to make it work once
zoom – not so bad but a Dell mini 10 was more responsive in this category
circular scrolling – not very important but it didn't really work anyway
assigning function to a corner – I tried assigning right click to one and it didn't work often


alright, I'm done ranting over that. Is there another driver out there to make this thing work? :O

speakers sound great. When listening to music they fill the room with love but for some reason sound less excellent when watching movies, I'm sure it's just me though.

The cd drive is a tray loader and accepts everything without a hitch...until it stopped working. I ripped about 1.5gb of music and in the process of doing more and it just kind of died. Then a few days later I try popping another cd in, doesn't work. Of course I was frustrated with it and I was opening and closing it over and over then slammed it shut. It started working. No lie. The next day it stops working again and as of today it works.


Altogether this is a good laptop, minus the trackpad it's *$^&^ awful. Keyboard is great and so are the speakers. The 3:30hr battery isn't great but not as bad as this other toshiba that was advertised at 2:30hr. I would definately recommend this machine over other comparitively priced machines. (This NV52 was $480 USD)

 

Wow. My stepmom got an NV7802 and I set it up for her. I thought the worst parts of the laptop were the keyboard and speakers lol.

 

I'm personally quite happy with my NV5207u. It's got the same screen size as the MD2604u that I had about a year ago, but the overall size of the computer is smaller. It actually fits in a case designed for a 15.4" notebook. The sound is quite exceptional in my opinion and when used with headphones, it sounds like you have a surround sound system turned on. Also, the Radeon HD 3200 graphics run Unreal Tournament III quite well, but you can't really have the graphics turned up too much. Anything else that I've thrown at it runs pretty good with decent framerate. As for the touchpad issue, I've encountered it a few times, but that's about it. I also use my Razer Diamondback 3G with it most of the time though.

 

This laptop is ok.

Personally I moved on from AMD chiped laptops. Going from AMD to Intel is night and day.

Once you step up from a AMD to Intel Core 2 duo you'll never want a AMD again. (unless they put them on a $299 netbooks)

 

I have another possible issue. when running this cpu stress program called "Orthos" from an undervolting guide on this website I got temperatures reaching 190 degrees F in five minutes. Is this normal for this computer?

Also what is the driver for the touch-sensitive buttons? I looked through the restore cd's but I'm not seeing anything that suggests that it is for those buttons

 

you have to install the launch pad driver for the buttons touch-sensitive I had the same issue and that solved it. it is a driver for win vista 64-bit but its the only one they have. I run it and worked. I have win7 64-bit.