Gateway's priceless notebooks

The larger 15.4in. NO50 also eschews mobile broadband, although it does include WiMAX support along with Draft-N Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0. Frankly, we'd rather have mobile broadband. The NO50's screen comes in WXGA (1,280 by 800) or WSXGA+ (1,680 by 1,050) resolutions.

The NO50 is a sizeable notebook measuring 36cm wide by 26.7cm deep by 3.4-3.65cm thick and weighing 2.9kg with a 6-cell battery and an optical drive. The weight rises to 3kg with a 9-cell battery and optical drive, and 3.1kg with a 9-cell battery and a 6-cell battery replacing the optical drive.

Battery life claims range from 3 hours with the 4,400mAh 6-cell battery to 7.5h with the 4,800mAh 9-cell battery and the 6-cell unit in the modular bay in place of the optical drive.

Again there's a wide choice of processors — no fewer than eight this time, maxing out at a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo T9600. The hard drive is configurable between 120GB and 500GB. As with the NO20 model, there's no solid-state drive (SSD) option.

Gateway's 'Office' series notebooks come with a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) security chip and a fingerprint reader, plus DDR3 memory.