Gateway NV5933u

[ Music ] ^M00:00:03 >> Scott: Hi. I'm Scott Stein, senior associate editor at CNET.com, and this is the Gateway NV5933u. Now, graduation time has happened, and back to school will be around the corner, so it's a great time to go shopping for a great budget laptop, and it happens to be that this is one of the best values that we've seen recently, so we wanted to tell you about it. The [inaudible] about the Core i3 i5 processor laptops that have hit, and actually we liked another Gateway, the Gateway NV7915u in the last Retail Roundup that we did. We gave it an editor's choice. Well, that one at $599 was a great deal. This one is $649, so it's a little bit more, but what's really cool is this one has a Blu-ray drive that also is a DVD burner. We haven't seen a laptop at this price range with this processor that includes Blu-ray, and that's a really nice add if you want to be able to play high def Blu-ray content. Now admittedly, the 15.6-inch screen, while it's nice, has a resolution of 1366 by 768, which is not full HD. On the other hand, it's got HDMI out, so you can out port this to another TV, and you can watch that content in full HD wherever you go. I mean, considering that we've seen some portable Blu-ray players at $500, at $649, this is a really great deal. You're getting a really good laptop underneath. The Core i3 processor we've liked a lot, and we find that it's really good for multitasking. It's great at handling HD and multimedia multitasking. Now, it doesn't have any graphics for gaming, but it does come with a 320 gig hard drive and 4 gigs of RAM. That's a nice combo, and the keyboard is great. It's usable. We don't love that track pad, especially this button here is a little hard to press, but these are minor quibbles. One issue that's a little more serious is the fact that the battery life is under 3 hours. Now, that's something that you're going to have to deal with. You'll have to take your laptop charger with you, but if you can put up with that and you can deal with a pretty nice size and a relatively attractive design, at $649 this Gateway might be for you. I'm Scott Stein, and this is the Gateway NV5933u. ^M00:02:04 [ Music ]