Gateway M210S

Gateway's M210S budget notebook offers an unusual wide-screen display in a fairly small form factor that may appeal to many people, but it sacrifices CD burning and DVD playback capability.

4/13/05 - Most manufacturers tend to provide a single budget notebook model for consumers, but Gateway differs by offering a variety of models with the budget oriented "S" model designation. The Gateway M210S is their primary budget model notebook that offers a wide screen in a compact design.

Powering the M210S is the Intel Celeron M 350, a very popular CPU for budget systems. This offers much of the same power saving benefits of the Pentium M processor but at a reduced cost and lower computing power. It is matched up with 256MB of PC2700 DDR memory that should be sufficient for most light task computing.

Storage on the M210S is very mixed. While it does come standard with a 40GB hard drive and 4-in-1 media reader, Gateway has opted to only include a 24x CD-ROM drive. This means that the notebook cannot view DVD movies or record music and data CDs. Both of these capabilities are considered standard now for notebook computers.

Graphics on the M210S are fairly unique. Most wide screen notebooks use either a 15.4" or 17" LCD display. The M210S uses a smaller 14.1" LCD display. This gives it the same resolution as larger displays but allows the system to be more compact. It uses the Intel Extreme 2 integrated graphics that is common for budget notebooks.

Overall, the Gateway M210S isn't a bad machine, but the lack of a CD-RW/DVD combo drive in the configuration will make a lot of people want to skip this model in favor of other budget models from Gateway.