-Hi, I'm Scott Stein, senior editor at CNET.com, and this is the Gateway NV55SO5u.
Now, in the world of budget laptops, 500 to 600 dollars can actually get you a lot nowadays and you can get something with a large hard drive, decent amount of RAM, and actually not too bad a processor.
So, it's hard to compare what you get for the money especially when you're looking in a budget laptop like this.
Gateway's model is part of a large range
of NV laptops that they make.
None of them over 699 and this particular one happens to have a processor that's the AMD A8.
Now what that is a higher end version of a new AMD line of processors that have graphics built right into that that gives you a little more a gaming amp for those who wanna play games and it's a little better than you will get with integrated graphics on your basic Intel Core i3 or i5 that doesn't have NVIDIA or AMD graphics in it, but it's not enough that it's gonna feel like a real gaming laptop
and at 629, this also comes with 640 gigabyte hard drive and 6 gigs of RAM.
That's more than the average for the price, but you're also getting a pretty and exciting looking body, very Mac look like, very white.
It does have a full number pad here.
The keyboards are little bit mushy and this thick and you've got a DVD drive here, but there's nothing really that exciting going on here.
The processor is a little slower than you would see of a Core i5.
It's a little more equivalent to an Intel Core i3, the new Sandy Bridge version,
but even then, it lacks in a few of our processing tasks.
Still, it's gonna give a good overall computing experience.
It's just not gonna be a screamer.
It does play games, so that's a plus at this price, but frankly, we have seen 500 and 600 dollar laptops that have maybe not its own set of graphics, but with integrated graphics that will do the job for most task including video streaming.
They are available from dell.
They hare available from HP.
A lot of those midrange models coming around that price.
It's a little harder to look at this as a great value budge laptop.
Another part of this laptop that might kill deal for some people is that this bulky 15-incher only got a little over 3 hours of battery life on our video drain battery test.
That's not a lot of time and it certainly not as much as you will get from a lot of laptops now.
So, there you go.
Look at a laptop that maybe gives a little more hard drive space and RAM for the money, but perhaps not the fastest processor on the market.
I'm Scott Stein and that's a look at the Gateway NV55SO5u.
