Gateway M360S

Gateway's M360S sets itself apart from most of the budget notebooks by offering a sizable 15.4" widescreen LCD display and a well rounded configuration, but the CD-RW/DVD Combo is a free upgrade that might not always be available.

4/14/05 - Widescreen displays have been very popular with desktop replacement and thin and light notebooks, but the costs of the screens have kept them from being placed in many budget notebook computers. Gateway breaks this trend with the M360S.

The M360S is very average in most respects to other budget notebook computers. It is powered by an Intel Celeron M 350 processor that provides a good battery life thanks to many of the power saving features introduced with the Pentium M. This is matched up with 256MB of PC2700 DDR memory that should do quite well for light computing tasks.

Storage is quite good thanks to a current offer at the time of the review for a CD-RW/DVD combo drive. This allows users to watch DVD movies or burn music and data CDs. Without this drive, the M360S would be a very different machine. It also includes an average 40GB hard drive and 4-in-1 media card reader.

The 15.4" wide screen display is really the unique feature for the M360S. This is great for those looking to watch DVD movies on the go or getting some extra computing desktop space for multitasking. It uses the Intel Extreme 2 integrated graphics that is acceptable for most applications but not great for 3D applications.

Overall, the Gateway M360S has enough to set itself apart from other budget notebooks, but it is important to note that without the free CD-RW/DVD upgrade, this machine lacks a key feature that makes the widescreen so key.