Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops

Gateway M-152XL - Thoughts and Summary

As we will see shortly, in terms of performance the Gateway M-152XL is the equal of the other two notebooks in this roundup. Short of running benchmarks, most users would be hard-pressed to notice a difference between any of these notebooks. What they will notice is some of the added or missing features. Considering you spend most of your time using a computer looking at the display, differences in laptop LCDs are also going to become readily apparent. Gateway definitely falls short in that area, and personally I would rather use just about any other LCD - although to be fair, many other budget 15.4" laptops are going to have the same or a similar LCD panel. Still, not everyone is an LCD snob, and the display definitely isn't unusable.

The build quality and features of the M-152XL are actually very good, and as we mentioned already, this is our favorite laptop in terms of appearance out of these three notebooks. The inability to customize Gateway notebooks is something of a drawback, and sorting between the various models can often be confusing. Some of the models are even specific for one retailer, so you can end up with two laptops with identical components but with different model numbers. Acer and HP notebooks have a similar drawback, but the benefit is that the companies are able to mass-produce a limited number of variations, helping to keep prices low.

One other problem that has to be mentioned with Gateway in particular is that their laptops come with a ton of preinstalled software. (Acer wasn't much better, if at all.) The first item on our agenda as soon as we booted up the notebook was to disable or uninstall anything we didn't feel was necessary. This list includes: an Internet security suite and antivirus software; Gateway's BigFix utility that notifies you about software updates; some unnecessary in multimedia applets; and lastly a variety of Internet games (including "buy me" nags) that you could easily find without any preinstalled software. (Okay, so the Internet security suite isn't necessarily a terrible thing to have, but personally it gets in my way and slows things down, and smarter web surfing habits are more important than software that very likely won't help if you do something stupid. I prefer my hardware router/firewall and an ounce of common sense when it comes to opening email attachments and downloading files.) The mass-produced aspect of Gateway notebooks removes the option for software customization, but thankfully it only takes about an hour or so (and a few reboots) to clean up all the extra junk.

The M-152XL certainly is an okay notebook, but after the P-6831 and P-7811 Gateway offerings, it fails to impress. Gateway seems dedicated to the price/performance conscious users, and the M-series offerings definitely fit that market. You'll sacrifice features, performance, and quality to varying degrees, but if all you're after is a basic laptop we encountered no difficulties with the M-152XL. It was extremely stable and feels as durable as any other notebook we've used. If Gateway could replace the LCD with something better, even if it increased the price by $100, our opinion of the notebook would improve dramatically. At the very least, a few models with a better display would be great. As the highest priced M-series laptop, the M-152XL/M-153XL need something extra to separate them from the less expensive models. Putting the cheapest LCD panel you can acquire into a $600 laptop makes sense, but once you reach $1000 or more we think most users would appreciate a better display with improved contrast and colors.