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Gateway M-7356U 15.4-Inch Notebook Review from Dave. Good for home or school use, The M-The M-7356U is at the top of Gateway’s “entry level” notebook line above the “LT” and “T” series. The build quality is above average with a good scratch resistant finish (thanks to parent company Acer which has some fairly advanced plastics manufacturing in Taiwan). The exterior is a glossy red metallic and the edges taper toward the front. Overall it looks a lot nicer than most of it’s competition but you had better like the color because it’s not very subtle.

The overall specs are decent :

Screen: The 15.4 screen is very bright and has a glossy finish that can make it hard to read outdoors but is great for indoor use. Acer makes the LCD themselves (which is unusual) and while not the best in class it’s a nice LCD.

CPU – The 2GHz dual-core Pentium T4200 is fairly standard for entry level computers (equates generally to the AMD Turion). The T4200 sits at the top of the Pentium stack and shares the same basic core as the Core2 line, just with less cache and a slower bus speed. While not a good CPU for gaming or CAD work it is about as good as you will get until you get to the Core2 Duo CPUs

RAM – 4GB is plenty for home use (some of the memory is shared with the graphics chip. At 667MHz it’s slower than what you will get with the Core2 line but again, fine for home use and enables better battery life.

Graphics – The Intel 4500M is not a great graphics part but it can handle light gaming and it’s an improvement over what Intel was offering. Also lower power than gaming graphics chips.

HDD – 320GB more than enough for home use. Most home users don’t exceed 50GB (video would be the most common thing that will fill up your HDD so if that’s your hobby look for a bigger drive).

Sound – It okay. Unless you get an “entertainment” laptop don’t expect much in the way of sound quality. Acer is about average in this class.

Battery – The 6 cell LiIon battery will give you about 2-3 hours of battery life depending on your usage and what you do to the power settings.

This is a good entry level design that competes well in its class (vs. the HP G60, Dell Inspiron 1545, and the Toshiba L505). The specs are about average and the finish is above average. For a little more money ($40-$100) you can get something from the new Gateway “NV” notebook line which is pretty much the same notebook with a more cpu and color choices (and a few exterior tweaks). Gateway offers slightly different variations to different retailers so it pays to look around. You can visit Gateway’s site to see the different models and who sells them.

To check price or purchase Gateway M-7356U 15.4-Inch Notebook.

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