GATEWAY P-170L REVIEW

The Gateway P-170L is a 17” budget notebook, which has a couple of surprises in store for us. Its a good laptop for entertainment purpose, except gaming.

Design
Covered in dark gray, this notebook from Gateway looks classy, and resembles the current Dell Inspiron lineup. The design is sturdy, but some amount of flex can be observed. The screen is a 17”, which is ideal for watching movies and playing games. It provides a maximum resolution of 1440x900, which is good for such a screen. The screen clarity was decent, and the color reproduction was good enough. A 1.3 MP camera has been included right above the display, while some media shortcut keys have been embossed into the key layout. They keyboard and touchpad are good enough, the only problem being that the buttons on the touchpad make a lot of noise and are not so ergonomic. The connectivity options are good, with the surprise inclusion of an HDMI port in it. Others include 3 USB, VGA, heapdphone/MIC, SD card slot, Express Card, Ethernet. Another setback was the absence of a Firewire port.

Performance
The notebook is powered by 2 Ghz Intel Core-2-Duo T7250, 2GB RAM, 320GB hard drive. The notebook incorporates a good performance chart, and multi-tasking was hassle free. Several applications like web-browser, media player and office utilities were multi-tasked without any noticeable slowdown. The battery lasted around 2 hours, which is good for a 17” notebook, and the WiFi performance was also good. The notebook provides a good price-performance ratio, which would make this a choice amongst users needing a cheap multimedia notebook.

Conclusion
The Gateway P-170L is a good notebook for the price at which it retails. The inclusion of an HDMI port is a definite plus, along with a superb battery life.

Pros
+ Good price-performance ratio
+ Good battery power

Cons
- Average design
- Absence of Firewire

Value For Money

Our Rating