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Gateway M500S Review

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  1. Jason •  June 15, 2003
    Rating: 4.5/5

    I’ve seen this thing hands on and it’s by far the best design I’ve seen. Slot-load CD is cool. Widescreen display is very bright, very crisp, good resolution. The speakers (with subwoofer) are very clear but not as loud as I had hoped. SD media slot, 3 USB 2.0, 6-pin and 4-pin 1394, all great features. Audio DJ…can play mp3, wma, cd audio, or audio off SD card without having to boot up machine. Great feature, saves ton of battery, but you can’t play it with screen fully closed. Alltogether, this laptop rocks.

    Rating: 9 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  2. - Mark •  June 16, 2003
    Rating: 3.5/5

    Specs and price are nice. However, I can’t help notice

    how it resembles an Apple Powerbook.

    Can’t PC makers design something original?

    Rating: 7 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  3. Dapper Dan •  June 16, 2003
    Rating: 1.5/5

    Try checking out this notebook:

    http://www.apple.com/powerbook/index17.html

    if you’re interested in a multimedia notebook. It was around before this Gateway knockoff, and unlike the Gateway, it runs OS X. :)

    Rating: 3 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  4. Bob C •  June 30, 2003
    Rating: 4.5/5

    I got one (of all places) on HSN before it was available on Gateway’s site. I am very pleased with this unit. Excellent video and screen. Watched a DVD all the way through without wanting to finish it on a TV!Not too heavy to lug around and it looks pretty sweet too. It was kinda tricky finding a bag it fit well in though.

    Rating: 9 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  5. frank •  July 8, 2003
    Rating: 2.5/5

    As Wintel laptops go this one is pretty nice.

    My unit had 6 defective pixels on the screen – they wouldn’t fix it. Fortunately only one is in a spot where I notice it all of the time.

    WiFi range is quite good – important on this sort of a device.

    Battery life is poor. I get between 1hr30min and 1hr45min on a charge. If I’m watching a dvd it drops to about an hour (and the unit gets hot).

    Audio quality on portables is a joke and this one isn’t great. If you are listening to mp3s take along a pair of headphones.

    It is one of the best 15″ windows laptops I’ve seen – I wish I would have looked at the Apple powerbooks more though. I sat next to one on a cross country flight and I’m afraid it completely outclasses my Gateway…

    sigh .. next time…

    Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  6. Jay •  July 8, 2003
    Rating: 5/5

    Awesome

    Rating: 10 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  7. nedlyj •  July 9, 2003
    Rating: 2.5/5

    First let’s talk about the good things:

    Screen, wireless range, speed, keyboard, sound, available i/o ports and aesthetics are all above average. The AV panel is a unique extra and the launch buttons are very nice. This is a machine I could be happy with for years – watching movies is also very enjoyable.

    So why am I only rating it a 5? Because several key areas are severely problematic: The AV panel buttons hit the lid when closed, rendering playback impossible with the lid closed – even though that’s the point. The launch buttons on my unit also hit the screen when closed – causing multiple sessions of Outlook and IE to be launched when you pick the laptop up to move it after closing the lid. Also, while movie watching is excellent – it ends up being horrible when the battery dies after only 1.5-1.75 hours, leaving you not quite satisfied that your movie has stopped before the end.

    With a real world 3-hour battery life and proper AV/launch buttons that don’t hit the screen this laptop would rate a 9-10. But as it is, these two items alone have rendered it useless for me. Back it goes…

    Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  8. Susan •  August 9, 2003
    Rating: 4/5

    I’ve had my M500S for a few weeks now and all in all I”m very satisfied with this laptop. I’ve worked on Apples for years, but my job required that I migrate to Windows, and frankly, with the instability of the Apple OS…..I’m not as upset as I thought I might be. Apparently the bugs mentioned in previous reviews with the screen triggering system buttons etc. have been fixed. The screen resolution is terrific, the sound better than I had anticipated. The only shortcoming is the battery life, as mentioned in other reviews. Compared to other laptops on the market, this model is well-priced for the features. According to the sales rep (I had a terrible time with on-line ordering from the Gateway website) in one of the retail stores, Gateway is looking at this model as a test for wider production. All in all I’m quite pleased

    Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  9. MMS •  August 11, 2003
    Rating: 3/5

    the battery life for this laptop is horrible. I got an 1hr 20 just surfing the internet. If I was watching a DVD is was about an hour.

    Rating: 6 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  10. John •  September 17, 2003
    Rating: 5/5

    I had my m500s notebook for about 3 months and I love it. It was a desktop upgrade for me I was using a pentium II 400 mhz gateway desktop we bout back in 1999 (it too was trouble free). Ilike the fact that I will be able to double my ram and even upgrade my hardrive at some point in the future if needed. I am using my laptaop for CAD and the display is fantastic! As far as Gateway’s service goes, noproblem there either. I wenet in one of thier stores to “see the laptop in person” they were very helpful. About a week later ordered online again with no problems. At first they gave me a ship date 3 days from ordering, then was pushe back by 2 weeks, but arrived in about 1 week.

    Being my first laptop i am still amazed at the computing power in such a small thin size.

    Rating: 10 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  11. sophie •  September 17, 2003
    Rating: 2.5/5

    I have to say I am very disappointed in the screen quality. Viewing difital photos on this is the worst. The monitor gives the pictures a fun house affect.

    Also, I can’t leave our home office, the wifi on mine isn’t great. I’ve had 2 people come out to check the set up to no avail.

    I wish I would have bought the apple instead.

    Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  12. memoryman •  October 25, 2003
    Rating: 4/5

    as i’ve only ever had powerbooks (3), i dreaded having to get a pc laptop for work. after looking everywhere, i shocked myself by getting the gateway. i’m very happy – it’s fast, display & keyboard are great, and i could almost get 2 for the price of a new powerbook. battery life is a little weak but i expect that from laptops honestly. if i could program the A/V jogdial to work as a scrub-wheel for editing i’d give it a 10!

    Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  13. John Martin •  November 4, 2003
    Rating: 2.5/5

    Since there is no serial port. I was not able to syncro my Palm Vx or my Kodak Vidoe camera. I have had this laptop three weeks and still spending money on stupid work arround that i chould not have to mess with. There is also no A drive and most products still come with drives on a floppy. I wish I had a less advanced more backward compatable model.

    Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  14. Bob C •  January 1, 2004
    Rating: 2.5/5

    I don’t know if this is common to all gateway laptops but I have keys snapping off the keyboard on a pretty regular basis. Sometimes they go back on and sometimes they are broken. I have had several Toshibas and you couldn’t get the keys off.

    Gateway is sending some replacement keys but they pop off too easy! Flat out flimsy keyboard!

    Rating: 5 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  15. A P •  January 15, 2004
    Rating: 4/5

    I like this laptop very much, mostly because it resembles the apple powerbooks but I could never use on since I need windows. My only problem with this laptop is for the past few months now my fan seems to come on quite often and is also quite loud. Anyone else with this problem? It has become quite annoying and the amount of hot air it seems to blow out also has me concerned. Never was like this when I first got this laptop in September.

    Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  16. Bob C •  January 17, 2004
    Rating: 4/5

    I don’t have the I really miss the “L” key!noise you mentioned but the heat eminating from the right hand side exhaust vent is intense.

    I still haven’t received the replacement keys.

    Rating: 8 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  17. ralph •  April 30, 2004
    Rating: 0.5/5

    ok this computer i mean this 3rd computer worked pretty good. yea thats right u heard me 3rd! first one i got had a dead pixel, 2nd one i got a dead pixel, also the dvd drive got lost and while reinstalling the driver windows got lost too. so they built me one a 3rd. i should have stopped at 2 but i was determined. ive had every problemwith this laptop that you could think of. so i dont know where to start, since there are no more stores they want me to send it in to get serviced for 44$ F**k that! ive got the run around from everyone and now im trying to get my money back fropm case manangement bc i lost a 20 pg paper bc i lost windows again! DO NOT BUY THIS COMPUTER

    Rating: 1 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  18. Valentino •  November 11, 2004
    Rating: 1/5

    I bought this laptop a little over a year ago. When I receeived it, it had a faulty charging system that would only charge the battery every once in a while. The screen is only good for about the first year. The pixels started to die around the edges of the screen. Lastly there is a major fault in the design of air flow. Just recently I found out that there was a major dust buildup that had blocked the cpu fan. In result it slowly burned out my cpu. Unless you want to keep upgrading your warranty and continually send your system back to gateway to fix, I suggest buying a mac.

    Rating: 2 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

  19. Christian •  March 2, 2005
    Rating: 5/5

    I’m a US Navy Information Systems Technician and I needed a versital computer to have on the ship, I choose the right one.

    This laptop in short is the best laptop I’ve ever owned, as now I’ve owned it for over 1 1/2 years and it’s still meeting some laptops the market today, here’s how.

    Many people don’t look INTO the M500 as I did when I went to go look into upgrading it, this machine is extremely upgradable as I found that if you were to remove the subwoofer, you find a SECOND HDD slot, so these days would give you the abality to have up to 200GB of HDD Space within one laptop, also there is a DVD Burner upgrade available for the laptop, and the Wi-Fi is supported by an internal mini-PCI slot when means many things, if you want, you can remove it and put in any number of things to add functionality, however as a laptop the best action is to leave it as a WiFi port, I upgraded to 802.11g with this nice feature. Also the motherboard manufacture has made it easy to upgrade the processor, just as long as you use the same system bus processor, if I’m not mistaken, that’s up to 2.8Ghz. I will admit the processor heat is high, but try sitting a regular P4 chip on your lap, I think you’ll prefer the P4-M. This laptop also has the nice feature of having a powered IEEE 1394 (Firewire) port and a non-powered firewire port (aka Mini-DV or DVI) so you can use your powered firewire device along w/ your non powered dvi device, most laptops these days still don’t have that feature. So, to this day I love my laptop, as I’ve less trouble out of it than my desktop or Server running Server 2003 SBS. Yes I did upgrade my laptop to Windows XP Pro as the Home ed. is the sorriest OS ever thoght of. I also upgraded my HDD to 80GB so I’m happely running 5 Different OS’s on here: Gentoo Linux 2004, Windows XP Pro, MacOS X 10.3, Darwin (Unix), MacOS 9.2. And I could add Sun Solaris if I wanted to. Hardware compatabality has made all this possible and I praise Gateway for this laptop, we need more like it!

    Rating: 10 :: 0 out of 0 people found this user review helpful.

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