Mobile Roundup: A Trio of Midrange Laptops

Gateway M-152XL - Overview

The last laptop in this roundup comes from Gateway, so in a sense Acer is represented twice. However, the M-152XL couldn't be more different from the Acer 6920G. Like the AVADirect IFL90, the M-152XL is also no longer in production, but the new M-153XL is identical in design and only differs by including a few upgrades. The upgrades don't really affect performance, so what we have to say about the M-152XL applies equally to the M-153XL.

The M-152XL is a very traditional laptop design, but a few minor changes improve the look. The M-152XL comes in three colors: pacific blue (our test unit), garnet red, or arctic bloom (light blue). It's a minor difference, but if we were to judge purely on the external appearance we'd rank the M-152XL as the "winner" of this roundup. Opinions on what looks nice will of course differ from person to person, so while we like the appearance there's plenty more to examine. Another interesting difference is that Gateway uses a slot-load DVDR instead of a traditional tray, but here we'd prefer to have a standard DVDR. For one, the slot-load drive is extremely noisy whenever you load/eject a disc, and the extra moving parts are one more point of failure. The other drawback is that if your drive ever fails (or if you want to upgrade to a Blu-ray drive in the future), it's going to be very difficult to find other slot-load options.

Delving into the internals, the M-152XL is also similar to the Gateway P-7811 in terms of assembly. You can access two compartments on the bottom, with one housing the mini PCI expansion slots and hard drive and the other containing the SO-DIMMs, CPU, GPU, and cooling system. There's really no reason to continue dismantling the laptop, short of replacing the motherboard, since you can get at all of the user-upgradeable components. Also note that the GPU (and GPU RAM) are soldered onto the motherboard, so there's zero chance of upgrading the GPU (which is only slightly lower than the 0.01% chance that someone will make a compatible MXM module for the other laptops during their lifetime). The M-152XL is also the only laptop we've tested in recent history to feature an ATI GPU, which is one of the reasons we wanted to get a test unit. Ideally, we'd like to get some laptops with the ATI and NVIDIA IGP solutions to test, as well as some of the newer 3000 series ATI parts, but so far we have not been successful in that endeavor.