Gateway P-7811FX 17" WUXGA Gaming Laptop

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Nice spec! Just not sure if $1,250 plus tax worths the prize!

This laptop has been reviewed in many places, like Maximum PC and Anandtech, always with very positive results. Essentially, every review agrees that this is the most amazing gaming laptop deal on the market, by far.

Because of this incredible price, I purchased this laptop recently, and it is amazing. The 17" 1920x1200 screen is bright and very sharp. The keyboard has a pretty decent feel to it. Battery life is very good when you're not gaming. The system is very responsive and fast, probably due to the 4GB of DDR3 ram. Plus, it's very upgradeable. the CPU is fairly easy to swap out. The DDR3 RAM that is uses will likely be cheap to upgrade a couple years down the road when 4GB is no longer enough. Also, it comes with a 7200RPM 200GB hard drive, and an extra hard drive bay. You could even run RAID 0 or 1 if you wanted. The gigabit ethernet and webcam(w/ mic), plus HDMI, and eSATA outputs are just icing on the cake.

The only real shortcoming of this laptop are the mediocre speakers, but when I'm gaming, I'd be using my good headphones anyway.

With the mobile 9800GTS graphics, this thing just flies through games. I was recently testing it, and it ran both Bioshock and Team Fortress 2 at max settings(and DirectX 10), at the native 1920x1200 resolution.

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Don't forget the free $50 game that is also included. I do not know if they still have the Vista Ultimate Upgrade for $69 but if they do you definitely are ahead and you can easily do a new install from the upgrade boxes. Just install it as a trial without entering the key and then reinstall over that with the key.

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I have looked around at every other laptop brand that I could think of, and found that a comparable laptop would cost at least $2000 from any other company, usually more around $2500. This laptop is the best value gaming laptop on the market, by far.

I would, without hesitation, recommend this laptop to anyone who needs something with these specs. Plus, you can get a free game when you purchase this computer. Looking through the games available at my local Best Buy, some good choices could be Call of Duty 4, or Sins of a Solar Empire.

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The only negative part of this purchase was my experience at the Best Buy store. The sales clerk who I was talking to told me that neither AVG or Avast (the two best known free antivirus programs) would work on vista 64. I called their bluff , and am currently running AVG on this laptop right now with no problems. I also checked the Avast website, and it also states that it has vista compatibility. I've heard the same thing from a few other people who bought computers at Best Buy, so it would seem that they're training their employees to lie to customers, in order to sell more software.

Here I thought that the point of going to a retail store(rather than purchasing online) is so that customers with less technical know-how could get purchasing advise from knowledgeable staff. Silly me.

It would seem that the more accurate description of Best Buy is that they're a retail store still in business because they deceive the less technical consumers into buying overpriced add-ons that they don't need. Like the Monster 8 foot HDMI cable that they currently have advertised "on sale" for $110. I wonder how many times the sales reps have persuaded people that they "need" this cable in order to get the full quality digital video output from their new Blu-ray player.

This laptop is so frikkin heavy that you will never carry it anywhere without using a pickup truck.
I recommend buying a much cheaper desktop.

I just picked this sucker up. Really no bigger than my existing HP dv9000z 17", although it does need another 1.38A at 19V than my prior HP (4.94A v. 6.32A).

Couple of things I like over my prior HP 17":
- Centrino 2 and DDR3 memory for system (the next gen of power reduction)
- The nVidia x800 models, instead of lower x600 models
- Included 2nd hard drive tray, standard SATA connector (no proprietary connector/no additional purchase required)
- HDMI and eSATA ports (although I know HP now does these too)
- Super-Multi Drive (all 5 DVD formats, just like HP)
- 1920x1200 standard (nice resolution, perfectly scales down to 800x600 4:3 too, for older titles/res), whereas HP is 1440x900 or 1680x1050 options (older 68xxFX model was only 1440x900 as well)

Things I do NOT like:
- Non-standard 10GB recovery partition (partition type 27h) -- I had to preserve it when installing Linux (although easy to do if you know what you're doing)
- Split 90GB NTFS partitions (WTF?), although I shrunk C: to 32GiB (I like my C: drive to be 32GiB, long story), and expanded D: to 128GiB (the rest is Linux, as is the 2nd disk).

NOTES on Linux support:
- nVidia's release driver 173.14.12 (7/30) now supports 8800M GTS (no more Beta release required)
- Intel Centrino 2 ICH seems to be well supported with newer kernels, right down to full AHCI compatibility for disk/optical
- New 5100AGN does require latest Intel driver and firmware that was just released, at least for native support (assuming you just don't go the NDISWrapper route)
- Haven't checked the extended Centrino 2 ICH HDAudio support in ALSA yet (will do so shortly, in the middle of moving over the 2nd disk)

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