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Gateway's TC7804u: $700 notebook dressed up in fancy-laptop style

Sold as an affordable media-friendly laptop with an eye toward design, Gateway's 14-inch TC7804u offers a decent collection of features and components at a low-end price.

Similar to the 15-inch MD7818u model we reviewed back in January, the TC7804u includes 4GB of RAM, a big hard drive, and a wide-screen 16:9 display, making it feel like a more expensive machine.

Still, we missed a few useful extras, such as Bluetooth and HDMI, and its touch-sensitive media controls looked better than they worked. As an aside, Gateway's convoluted naming system for laptops is still a mystery to us. … Read more

Apple tops PC customer satisfaction survey

Apple easily outdistanced its peers in a PC industry customer-satisfaction survey conducted by Forrester Research that found PC companies are only slightly more well-liked than insurance companies.

An overall satisfaction rating of 80 percent was good enough for Apple to trounce the second-place finisher, Gateway, which scored 66 percent. Forrester surveyed 4,564 U.S. consumers online in October in compiling the results, which were published Friday on the research firm's Web site.

Apple and Gateway were followed by HP, Compaq, and Dell, respectively in the survey results. (Compaq, though part of HP, is generally counted separately in branding … Read more

Acer's Mac-like 13-inch Aspire 3935 arrives

A mere week after we saw a truckload of new Acer and Gateway laptops at the company's New York showcase (well, it was technically in New Jersey...), the first of Acer's new offerings has arrived in our Labs.

It's a good one to start out with -- the Aspire 3935 is a 13-inch laptop with a brushed metal chassis that's a little less than one inch thick and has a 16:9 widescreen LED display. The system, like many of the upcoming Acer and Gateway laptops we've previewed, adds MacBook-like multitouch gestures to its touchpad. … Read more

In new Acer line: Bigger Netbooks, better batteries

Acer, the global PC giant that also owns the Gateway, eMachines, and Packard Bell brands, announced a collection of new systems Tuesday evening during a press event held at New Jersey's Liberty Science Center.

Interspaced with a series of IMAX videos containing enigmatic imagery and slogans ("Light as your time can be"), Acer CEO Gianfranco Lanci discussed the company's "multibrand" strategy for selling new products across the Acer and Gateway brands. The emphasis was on Netbooks--not surprising, given the success of the $349 Acer Aspire One--and new ultraportable systems with Intel's newest ultralow-voltage central processing units.

None of the dozen-plus new laptops, Netbooks, Nettops and all-in-one PCs are available yet--we're told to expect them starting in June for the back-to-school season (and some may never even be released in the United States), but here are some of the highlights:

Acer Timeline series A collection of 13.3, 14.1, and 15.6-inch models with LED 16:9 displays, Intel ULV processors, touch pads with multitouch gestures (as on current MacBooks), and innovative passive cooling (developed by Intel and called Laminar Wall), which purports to keep the laptop's outer surface cooler to the touch.

By using ultralow-voltage CPUs and LED (light-emitting diode) displays, Acer claims that these new systems can run up to 10 hours on a single battery charge. Other PC makers have made similar claims in the past, usually by following extreme usage models, such as requiring you to dial the screen brightness way down or cut power to certain features. … Read more

HP finally introduces Core i7 desktops

Both Dell and Gateway launched Core i7 PCs in time with Intel's announcement of its new chip family last November. We don't know why HP has waited to make the switch, but with today's announcement of the Pavilion Elite m9600 desktop series, a quad-core Core i7-equipped HP can be yours starting at $949.

We've found Intel's Core i7 chips very fast, especially in the most demanding tasks like consumer-level digital media editing and multitasking. Core i7 has also been hailed as an expensive platform, as Intel is the only source for the necessary motherboard chipset, … Read more

$500 to $750 retail desktop review roundup

Updated to correct CPU name typo.

We're in the home stretch of our retail desktop review for this quarter. The low-end and mid-range have both been covered, and we just wrapped up the $500 to $750 middle ground on Friday.

We had four contenders in this category, with one each from Dell and Gateway, plus HP's Pavilion a6700y and the step-up Pavilion a6750y.

Of the four, we liked the $710 Pavilion a6750y the most. It offers the best all-around performance thanks to its quad-core AMD chip, with a hearty 8GB of RAM and a large 750GB hard drive … Read more

Our favorite budget gaming laptop returns: the Gateway P7805u FX

Gateway's budget-minded 17-inch gaming laptops have impressed, offering a mix of decent components and high-end video cards for around $1,200. While the now discontinued P-7811 FX is still hunted for on message boards and eBay, Gateway now has a mostly worthy replacement, the P-7805u FX (part of our Winter 2009 Retail Laptop Review Roundup).

Getting an Nvidia GeForce 9800 GPU and a big 320GB 7200rpm hard drive for only $1,149 is about as good a bang for your buck as you're going to find, but, there were a couple of corners to be cut, notably the … Read more