Digital Trends

Gateway NX570 February 18th, 2007 | by Justin Whitaker

Out of the Box Setup

The laptop arrived neatly and securely packaged in a white box adorned with the Gateway logo and typical cow spots decorating the sides. Unpacking the box revealed a set of user manuals, backup CD for Windows MCE and Works, an AC power adapter, the 6-cell lithiom ion battery and a quick start guide. Installing the battery and plugging in the AC adapter was a snap, and the laptop booted up quickly after I located the power button. The power button emits a faint blue glow once the laptop is turned on, which is a nice departure from the traditional green LED that is used in most laptops today.

Once the desktop screen appeared, I experienced my first and only major issue with using the laptop. The touchpad used to control the mouse pointer was DOA. I tried fiddling with the settings under the Mouse options in the Control Panel, I tried searching through the BIOS for any settings related to the touchpad and then finally tried to install different drivers – but nothing was able to resuscitate the touchpad.

Without the option to use the touchpad, I was left only with the option of using an external mouse. Luckily I had an extra USB mouse that was immediately recognized by Windows once plugged into the USB port. I used this USB mouse throughout the testing process.

With the mouse up and running, I was finally able to start using the machine and to complete the setup process. Unfortunately the bulk of the setup required uninstalling demo software and other unwanted programs. This process alone took nearly 30 minutes to remove the programs and unclutter the desktop and system tray. I can understand the usefulness of some software that was pre-installed, such as Microsoft Works and Google Desktop, but I really dislike the trial antivirus software, AOL software and similar programs. One of the more annoying pop-ups that kept interrupting me was an offer from Gateway to upgrade to an extended warranty service. While some people may not mind getting pop-ups for an offer to purchase an extended warranty, I was really irked by it. If I wanted the extended warranty, I would have purchased it when buying the laptop!

Performance Testing

The performance evaluation of the NX570X was completed over a 30 day time period. All of the typical tasks you would perform with this type of notebook – watching DVDs, surfing the web, listening to music, spreadsheet calculations, word processing, burning CDs, etc. – were undertaken in order to put the NX570X through the paces to see how well it would stack up to the competition.

When considering the performance of a Core 2 Duo laptop, it’s important to understand that nearly all of these laptops are based on the Intel 945PM or Intel 945GM chipset. This chipset is the current standard for Core 2 Duo laptops and is part of the Intel Centrino Duo platform. Similarly, in order for the laptop to be labeled as a “Intel Centrino Duo” laptop, the integrated wireless adapter will be the Intel Pro/Wireless adapter. Simply put, this means that the real differentiators in terms of performance from one Core 2 Duo laptop to the next will be the speed of the CPU, RAM and hard drive as well as the graphics chip. The motherboard chipset and the wireless adapter are all the same, and thus will have no bearing on performance.

Application Performance

A true performance test of any laptop is the number of applications it can run simultaneously without getting bogged down. The NX570X handled every application I could throw at it, and then some. At one point during the testing I had 8 web browser windows open, 2 Works documents, iTunes and a DVD playing – while also running Folding@Home in the background – and I was able to quickly switch between each application without experiencing any pauses or stutters. The DVD movie played smoothly without dropping any frames and I could pause the movie, switch to iTunes to start up some music and then start surfing the web without any of the annoying 2-3 second delays you would normally expect with a less powerful laptop. In this area, the Core 2 Duo CPU really delivers and the NX570X doesn’t miss a beat.

The Right and Left side of the NX570