Gateway is an old-school name in the computer world, being quite big in the 90s, becoming obscure in the 2000s, and finally starting to make a comeback in the last couple of years. As such, it’s probably no surprise that Gateway has made a nice little ultra-slim notebook, and not only that, but it’s going for a pretty great price, too. You can pick it up from Walmart for just $299, a nice $186 discount on the retail price of $485, so it’s worth picking up if you want a budget notebook.
One thing that we’re especially impressed about is the 14.1-inch screen that comes with an FHD resolution, which isn’t usually the case with notebooks at this price bracket, and means that you get a lot of great screen real estate for your productivity work. The keys are also pretty nice to work with and about what you’d expect for the price, and the mousepad is massive and centrally placed, which can be a good or bad thing depending on how you rest your hands. It also has a fingerprint reader, which will be great since big tech firms are teaming up to banish passwords for good, and logins will begin to rely on things like Microsoft Hello to log in, so you’re at least future-proofed.
As for under the hood, the ultraslim comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 3500U, a mid-tier CPU that’s surprisingly good for this laptop and should handle most productivity software and tasks relatively easily, without too much of a performance impact if you open a few apps at the same time. Of course, there’s no discrete GPU like you might expect with a gaming laptop; instead, you get the integrated Vega 8 Graphics, which will let you get away with some casual and indie gaming, although nothing too GPU-intensive. Besides that, you get 8GB of RAM, which, again, is very surprising for this price bracket, as well as 256GB of storage, which is probably going to be enough for most folks, although grabbing an external hard drive deal might be a nice idea to help supplement internal storage.
All in all, the Gateway ultrathin notebook is a surprisingly great and lightweight device that’s going for a pretty sweet deal at just $299, down from $485. That being said, if the Gateway doesn’t work for you, why not check out some other great laptop deals while you’re at it.