While I was at work on Friday a new toy arrived at my house. It was my new laptop, the Gateway LT 3103u. This is one of those better netbooks that are basically a laptop. The screen is 11.6" which is bigger than what a netbook's can be and is at a higher resolution at 1336x768. Its a 16x9 screen so thats the reason for the odd resolution. Underneath the hood we have a 1.2 GHz AMD Athalon 64 processor couped with an ATI X1270. Yea its not going to be pumping Crysis out at 60FPS but its speed really does suprises me. It has 2GB of RAM and a 250GB Harddrive, oh and its running Windows Vista Home Basic and I'm debating if I should put the new Windows 7 beta on it. Overall it is very snappy, it takes about 30-40 seconds to boot which seems pretty fast to me. I have multiple programs open at once. I even did a stress test to see how much I could do and I was suprised. I had two games of Braid running, some music from the Zune software, a video playing in WMP, and was surfing the web and it was still running pretty smooth. Now I mentioned Braid so you may ask what other games have I tried? Well nothing real crazy. I bought Braid, Peggle, Plants vs Zombies, and all of those run great. Though I did play a little Half Life 2 and here's a screen of the details ithas me running at. Now I'm not sure about the framerate but it runs pretty smooth.
It looks really good actually. I might even say Xbox 360 quality graphics though framerate is a little different story. But thats pretty much it. The computer is dead silent and doesn't heat my room so thats good. But overall I really like it. When I first got it and was using it, it seemed pretty slow then I took Norton off and bam instant speed burst. It doesn't play HD YouTube very well since thats pretty processor dependent. I really like it and for $400 you really cant go wrong. I would of liked to get that HP DV2 but that was like $800. Ill just end up getting a beefier desktop later on anyway. The only problem I have with this laptop is the battery life. It seems very short though I do have it in full bore. If I put it on power saver it says 6 hours but its really slow, will probably use if I'm just writing a paper or something. My satisfaction could not be higher, Im very suprised by the build quality of this Gateway laptop and I'm glad Gatewayy is getting back on there feet.
