Digital Trends

Gateway M520S

October 24th, 2004 | by Ian Bell

Setup and Use

Setting up the M520S is very easy. Simply power it up and answer the questions which Microsoft asks you for first time use in the Windows operating system environment. Once you are into the system you will want to activate the built in WiFi by pressing the Fn + F2 keys. Gateway wisely ships their systems with the built-in WiFi turned off, most likely to prevent others from accessing your system without your permission.

We found the keyboard to have a more solid feeling than the M320 we reviewed earlier in the month. The M320 has a very mushy feeling keyboard that tends to sink a little in the middle while being used. This was not the case with the M520S system. The hot keys located above the keyboard are a nice touch, but we could not figure out how to reprogram them. The e-mail key will simply activate the default e-mail client while pressing the information key goes to a Gateway/CompuServe website. More customizability would have been nice to have.

During the testing phase of this system we ran into several problems. First, once we installed Mobile Mark and started to run its tests, the program would fail halfway through. We tried running Mobile Mark no less than 6 times and each time we encountered the same error. So we thought maybe our test disc was corrupted.  We decided to run Sysmark so we could at least get some benchmarks completed. We were unable to get the M520S's DVD drive to read our disc and the installation process would fail ¾ of the way through. With one more trick up our sleeve, we moved our SiSoftware Sandra software over the network and installed it on the M520S directly from its hard drive. The CPU Arithmetic test worked ok showing average scores for the systems processor. They were a tad bit higher than the M320XL system we reviewed featuring a 1.7GHz Pentium M processor. The M520S was not able to run the CPU multimedia tests which caused the system to crash each time. Our 3dMark 2001 tests showed the M520S on par with other laptops using the Intel integrated graphics — which yields below average results. During normal operating use, the M520S behaved fine showing no signs of failing. It was extremely frustrating to not be able to run the standard benchmarking tools on the system.   By the time our testing was done, we were very happy to be done with it.

Battery life on the M520S was pretty good for a system using a desktop class processor. The 4.4mAh Lithium-ion battery did a fairly good job yielding an operating time of just a little under 3 hours of use before needing to be recharged. Its worth noting that we are pleased Gateway decided to use a Lithium-ion based battery in this system. Dell announced a few months back that they would be ditching the Lithium-ion batteries in their low-end systems in favor of a cheaper battery type.

Conclusion

The M520S really is a disappointing system. Gateway is trying to brand the system as a multimedia powerhouse, but other than the processor, there really is nothing “multimedia” about it. The 15” screen is small, there is no FireWire capabilities built into the system and there are no media card slots. We also do not understand why Gateway chose to stick with the Intel integrated graphics chip which only has 32MB of memory on it. Add to that a scroll touch pad is basically useless and you have a very unpleasant system on your hands.  There were not any software products that came with the M520S that enhanced the system to brand it a “multimedia” laptop either.

The truth is that you will be very hard pressed to find a real desktop replacement notebook with 512MB of RAM and a desktop class processor for under $1000. We checked out desktop replacements from Sony, Toshiba, HP and Dell and could not find a system that matched or beat the Gateway M520S in price. Our recommendations: finance or save $500 dollars more and get the Sony A320 notebook which is a killer multimedia system and only costs $1799 — money well spent. If you just cannot see yourself spending that much on a system consider going with a Centrino based system such as the Gateway M320, or Gigabyte N512.