Gateway T-6836

[ music ] >> I'm Dan Ackerman, senior editor at CNET dot com and we are gonna take a look at the Gateway T-6836. Now we've been rounding up a whole bunch of back to school laptops recently. You know the retail models that you'd actually find in brick and mortar stores, the kind you just go and get right off the shelf and in the budget category that's laptops between 7 and 800 dollars; this guy was our favorite. Component wise a lot of these systems are gonna be the same. Most of them are 15 inch laptops. We kind of prefer the 14 inch size right here; it's a little bit easier to carry around from class to class. Now unlike a lot of the other laptops in that 7 to 800 dollar range, we really like the construction on the T-6836 even though it's mostly plastic, it's pretty solid, it's got some nice metal accents here around the keyboard. The CPU's the same as you'd find in pretty much any laptop in this price range, a mid line Intel Core 2 Duo, but you do get 4 gigs of RAM which is nice, and the 64 bit version of Windows Vista. So one thing you lose out on sometimes at the lower end of the budget scale is the battery life and this guy got up actually to just about 3 hours, which is pretty good for a laptop in this price range. So for solid construction, 4 gigs of RAM, and better than average battery life, this is our budget back to school choice right now. I'm Dan Ackerman and that's the Gateway T6836. [ music ]