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Gateway NE 72206u review: An affordable, but not so swift, big-screen laptop |
December 25, 2013
Desktop-replacement laptops like the Gateway NE72206u have two major advantages over their smaller brethren, including lots of screen real estate and a full-size keyboard. For many users, these features are paramount, trumping other concerns such as portability and battery life. Of course, some systems take better advantage of their large size than others do. The NE72206u—with its 17.3-inch, 1600-by-900-pixel display and its large keyboard with full numeric keypad—falls somewhere in the middle, mainly because it’s not an overwhelming performer. But with a street price of just 500 bucks, we’re not complaining.
Gateway’s NE72206u isn’t the lightest or most powerful laptop you’ll find, but this desktop replacement does offer a 17.3-inch display and a compelling price-to-performance ratio.
Components and performance
The NE72206u is built around an AMD A6-5200 CPU with integrated AMD HD 8400 graphics. It also has 6GB of memory (500MB of which is allocated to the graphics), and a 500GB, 5400-rpm Toshiba MQ01ABD050 hard drive. Together those components helped the laptop produce a WorldBench 8.1 score of 100—the same as our reference-point notebook (a now aging Asus VivoBook S550CA). Its battery life of 4 hours, 22 minutes, on the other hand, is quite good for a desktop replacement.
In hands-on use, the NE72206u is smooth enough once Windows does its caching thing, but it doesn’t snap to as a machine based on a faster AMD A8/A10 or an Intel Core i3 processor would. Adding a solid-state drive would be an easy way to goose this system, but the NE72206u is a tease in that respect: Although it has a second drive bay just waiting to fulfill that fantasy, the bay lacks a SATA connector. That means you’d have to ditch the hard drive to add an SSD. At least you can easily access both the bays and the memory by loosening nine captive screws and removing one large panel on the bottom of the unit.
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Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2082784/gateway-ne-72206u-review-an-affordable-but-not-so-swift-big-screen-laptop.html#tk.rss_reviews
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