By Perry Longinotti, Alberta Canada Note to readers: This notebook shares the same chassis as the American NX850 series sold through Gateway.com, so this review might be of interest to people researching that machine as well Gateway 8510GZ angle view ( ) I like Gateway. In my opinion the image of jersey cow boxes and green pastures that Gateway uses in their ads is cool. I have always imagined these ads being particularly effective on people like my parents. They like seeing ads for technology that show cute little animals dancing to disco music and I am sure that if they were in the market for a PC that Gateway’s marketing campaigns would do the trick. Gateway is like a friendlier and less successful version of Dell. For reasons that I can’t fully articulate, I like Gateway whereas I tend to avoid Dell.

• Gateway Pa2 8510gz

Gateway 8510GZ Drivers Drivers for Notebooks ⇒ Gateway Laptops & Desktops ⇒ Page #1 ⇒ Gateway 8510GZ All equipment facilities installed on Gateway 8510GZ are.

Maybe this is because people tend to cheer for the underdog — Gateway is definitely an underdog. So, I like Gateway because they have funky cow-like boxes and they are an underdog. Never let it be said that marketing is not valuable. Hey, any marketing person that can convince people to associate highly toxic beige machines with lush natural vistas is doing their job. Besides, in a world of commodity PCs that are made in anonymous Chinese factories, I think PC makers are happy to take any point of distinction that they can get.

The Gateway 8510GZ that I am reviewing is not in fact the first Gateway that I have wanted to buy. For the longest time you could not buy Gateways in Canada. This was a shame as they always seemed to have a compelling laptop in their lineup whenever I was in the market. Heck, I found this website while researching the infamous eMachines 6809 — that was a very hot widescreen laptop with an Athlon64 (user upgradeable) and a RADEON 9700. Technically that could also count as a Gateway product since they were in the process of merging with eMachines (who were having their way with the value segment of the PC market at the time). I was not sure how the newly merged entity would compete in the value segment, I figured it would go as badly as Compaq/HP.

Thankfully it seems Gateway’s mobile products have become much better as a result of the merger. Gateway is making notebooks that really appeal to budget conscious gamers.

Gateway Pa2 8510gz

I don’t know what this segment is worth, but I know that I cycle through a few notebooks per year (at least). I suspect that much like the PC video card market where the midstream cards are ATI and NVIDIA’s bread and butter, the mid-priced gaming capable notebook is in the middle of the bell curve. As a life-long gamer and parent of a school-aged child I can tell you that the best way to sell a school computer is to make it play games really well. The Gateway 8510GZ is priced at $1599 CDN and is clearly a computer designed to be a family PC. Canadian naming conventions for Gateway products is different than in the USA. This notebook shares the same chassis as the American NX850 series, so this review might be of interest to folks researching that machine as well.

I should also point out that I am a Mac guy. Everything else being equal, I would get a Mac. Frankly the only reason I can think of for buying a Windows notebook over a Mac notebook for family use is games. It is that simple. So in this case I really like Gateway’s decision to spec a machine that can play games fairly well at a very competitive price.

In this case, the 17″ Gateway 8510GZ represents a much better value than the 14″ iBook and costs a little bit less. First Impressions Open the box and what do you see? You see a nice friendly, Setting up your Gateway Notebook’ card. This is awesome.

Do I need to read this? No, of course not and you probably don’t either. But think about your parents, or any non-technical folk whom you might have to give guidance to regarding: what computer should they buy? Do you really want people who asked for your help to open up the box and see a scary Microsoft COA card and 100 page manual?

I have had at least a dozen notebooks on the bench in the past year or two and this is the only one that had a nice simple getting started guide upon opening the box. Gateway is the only PC maker that puts thought into the out of the box experience, in my experience. Apple excluded — they do the out of the box experience better than anyone. The 8510GZ’s box is small enough that you could use it for trips if you don’t have a bag. That is pretty small considering how big this laptop is, and of course it has the white and black cow theme happening.

I prefer this to the more common brown paper bag look. Why do huge PC manufacturers (cough Sony, Toshiba) dress their product boxes up like a bottle of malt liquor? Despite the modest price of the 8510GZ the initial impression of build quality is quite good.

I am usually a snob regarding materials used to manufacture notebooks, I like to see metal used as much as possible. But it isn’t fair to expect aluminum, magnesium or titanium construction on a machine priced like this — this is well under half the cost of a 17″ PowerBook!

Gateway has picked some fine plastics here. The 8510GZ has a reasonable weight of 7.7 pounds (quite good for a 17″ screen notebook), but the chassis is satisfyingly stiff and solid-feeling. There is no unwanted flex when you rest your hands on the palm rests. The LCD lid has no flex and the hinges are sturdy. With a thickness of 1.2 inches the 8510GZ looks thin given its size. Overall, this is a conservatively styled yet handsome notebook.

Gateway 8510GZ closed right side view ( ) Gateway 8510GZ right side view opened ( ) Gateway 8510GZ left side view open ( ) The keyboard layout is smart. Have you ever wondered why notebook makers do not use the additional chassis space that having a 17″ screen offers for a full sized keyboard and numeric keypad? There are a lot of big screen notebooks on the market that look silly with out-of-proportion keyboards. Thankfully the 8510GZ’s designers used all the space afforded by the XXL width chassis and filled it with a great keyboard. Key travel is a little longer than I am used to, tactile feel is good, and stiffness is better than average. Overall it is quite nice — better for heavy typists like me I think. Gateway 8510GZ keyboard view ( ) Gateway has spared the user the usual array of bright lights and convenience buttons that plague laptops these days.

Instead they have employed a clean look. For example, the track pad is thankfully gimmick free — and it works well out of the box. Specifications In my opinion, the specs are impressive. I don’t expect a budget machine to have this degree cutting-edge componentry. For a very reasonable amount of money you get the latest version of Centrino.

This includes 533 FSB, dual channel DDR2, SATA and PCI-Express among other things. Nice stuff, let’s look at the details. The CPU is an Intel Pentium M at 1.73GHz with 2 MB of cache. I was expecting to see the Banias’ Pentium-M which has less cache memory and uses a slower front-side bus used in budget products like this into 2006. This is a very nice part at the price. Basically, it means that you get a CPU that is 20% faster than the previous generation.

The Hyundai memory used in the 8510GZ is DDR2 in dual channel mode. This means that the 8510GZ’s 512 MB of RAM comes in the form of two 256 MB PC4300 SODIMMs. Yes, this makes memory upgrades a little trickier because in order to keep the higher performance dual channel mode you will need to buy a matching pair (two) of same-size SODIMMs (and let’s face it who will want to buy your two 256 MB SODIMMs?), but the performance increase makes this worth it. It has been a long time since I tried to use a PC with only 512 MB of RAM, but I will suffer through this so that you can determine whether an upgrade is necessary.

Storage is handled by a wonderfully big and fast 100 GB HDD. In fact the 8510GZ uses a Hitachi Travelstar 5K100 ATA drive. Yeah, this is an ATA drive instead of the supported SATA interface, but in terms of performance you lose nothing, and according to the Hitachi data sheet for this drive the ATA version sues less power than the SATA version. Hitachi’s 7200 RPM drives are by far the best mobile drives in the industry, so having a 5400 RPM drive from them makes me feel a lot better.

This particular drive was split into two partitions. The C: drive has about 90 GB and the D: drive is configured as a recovery partition. Some folks may like to reclaim this space, but I think that including it is a nice touch. When you boot the 8510GZ it prompts you whether you want to go into the recovery console.

I checked it out, and it looks a lot like a SUSE Linux install — very clean and easy to understand options. You can opt for a full restore (with format) or a system restore (old files backed-up). The recovery partition is adequately protected from accidental deletion. You’ll get this if you try to change files on the recovery partition ( ) Complimenting the HDD is an 8x Dual Layer DVD burner made by TSST. It is relatively quiet when reading and writing.

It is nice to see drives like this trickling down, but I have not heard anything about TSST before so your guess is as good as mine regarding reliability. With 16x PCI-Express being a standard feature of the new Centrino package, Gateway has wisely spec’ed ATI’s RADEON X700 video chip with 64 MB of ram. I would have liked to see 128 MB, but I guess compromises had to be made in order to hit a price point. The Mobility X700 is quite a capable part — it exceeds the capabilities of a desktop RADEON 9800.

Clock speeds on the X700 are 350 GPU and 350 RAM. This memory is standard DDR, not the more exotic DDR2 or GDDR. It isn’t clear whether the memory bus is 64-bit or 128-bit, but the tests will fill in the blanks. There are both VGA and S-Video out ports on the 8510GZ. The 17″ widescreen is very bright and has a high contrast/glare coating. It looks good in natural light, but might cause a headache in an office environment.

The native resolution of 1440.900 is lower resolution than the ideal for a 17″ screen, in my opinion. The refresh rate was very good when watching movies and playing games. The Gateway 8510GZ has a glare type reflective screen, notice the mysterious reflection of an author in the 3D computer graphic on the screen — no, that’s not a ghost ( ) The balance of the spec is typical Centrino, no unpleasant surprises. You get 802.11 B/G wireless with very good range, 10/100/1000 LAN, audio in/out, four USB 2.0 ports, an SD/MemoryStick reader and Firewire. Software The software bundle reflects the budget nature of the 8510GZ. You get Windows XP Home edition, Microsoft Works 8.0 (with Picture It, Encarta, and Money 2005), Nero Express, Cyberlink DVD player, Norton Internet Security and McAfee Internet Security. Right off the bat, I don’t really like seeing security products from Norton and McAfee on the same machine.

On first boot you will have pop-ups from these two programs competing for your attention — and that doesn’t even factor the built-in SP2 security features MS has added to their Operating System. Sadly, this pain-in-the-butt is not mitigated by at least getting a full year of updates. The Norton Antivirus subscription is only good for 90 days. I removed both and downloaded Avast Antivirus (free for non-commercial Home use). Free tools from Lavasoft and MS do a good job of keeping spyware at bay. I was also a little disappointed with the amount of HDD filler installed on the 8510GZ.

A legion of AOL utilities were installed on the 8510GZ, and there was an install disk in the box, and in case you somehow missed the AOL stuff installed and included in the box, the very first site you will see when opening Internet Explorer is an AOL page. Other offending applications included Real Player, QuickTime and Adobe Acrobat — all of which will keep resource eating agents running in the background.

It is better to install these when needed and configure them to not eat up RAM. I also do not appreciate applications that prompt you to upgrade as soon as you open them. MS Picture It prompted me to upgrade’ to Digital Image Suite, Encarta, and Money — all premium’ editions. I guess the versions already installed on the 8510GZ are you get what you pay for editions.’ Why would Gateway subject their customers to this? Take all the cripple ware off this machine and add one useful application (maybe MS Word) and I think you could really differentiate a product like this. Yuck, it’s MS Upgrade “Annoy Ware” ( ) Gateway has a friendly restore disk utility that will prompt you to burn recovery disks.

I liked this and it worked well. Another interesting application is BigFix’ which seems to be an application that monitors security status and reminds you to apply patches – pretty neat but perhaps redundant (MS automatic updates does the same thing). I checked out their website, and this looks like it might be a tool that would make remote support easier for Gateway. Performance As always, this is the interesting part. The 8510GZ is built up with some nice components. As you would expect, the CPU performance is terrific when compared to other recently tested P-M based notebooks turning in an awesome 1:44 in SuperPi (see chart). Gateway somehow manages to beat a few faster notebooks with the 8510GZ.