Gateway's notebook lineup under Acer starts to gel

By Tim Conneally | Published April 11, 2008, 7:33 PM

In the interest of keeping the individual identities of the whole family of Acer properties alive, Gateway has announced an expansion of its notebook lines.

During the launch of Acer's Gemstone, analyst John Spooner of TBR remarked to BetaNews that the company looked to be positioning itself at the high end of the market, above Gateway and Packard Bell. If that is the case, then today's announcement makes Gateway look appealing to the "top 2/3" gamer/enthusiast market. All models will include Windows Vista SP1, with some offering an upgrade to Vista Home Premium 64-bit Edition SP1.

Some new FX edition notebooks were announced: the P-172X, M-6850FX, and P-6860FX.

The P-172X has an Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 processor, NVidia GeForce 8800M GTS with 512 MB GDDR3, 4096 MB of memory, 2 x 160 GB RAID HDDs, a slot-loading DVD-R/RW/RAM drive, fingerprint scanner, 1.3 megapixel webcam, and a 1920x1200 17" WUXGA TFT display. It is available for $1,999.99 directly from Gateway.

The other two FX models announced today will be available at Best Buy beginning this weekend. The M-6850FX comes with an Intel Core2 Duo T5550 processor, ATI Radeon HD 2600 graphics, 3072 MB of DDR2 SDRAM and a 320 GB 5400 rpm SATA HDD, while the P-6860FX comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 processor, NVidia GeForce 8800M GTS with 512 MB GDDR3, 3072 MB of DDR2 SDRAM and a 250 GB 5400RPM SATA HDD. Retail prices for these are $999.99 and $1349.99 respectively.

Comments

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Gateway is making some great products. Having just bought a lot of them for myself, and my daughters family they are very good. They are hitting all the price points with quality products. The 24" monitor is the best I have ever seen with all the ports you need for the future. Maybe Dell had the nintys, but gateway looks to have the future. Microsofts Vista is the only week point in computing now, hopefully they will sone have a XP like OS that will make computers sing again. HDCP is the cause of Vista. We have to have less enjoyment of our computers now, because we can make copies of something we may want to see in the future. It was Ok to do so when the copy was not so good. WHY ?

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Why the hell should the ability to copy movies make a computer more or less enjoyable?

If you've already got the movie...who cares? If you downloaded it, HDCP has already been bypassed.

What? You want to rent from netflix and copy for personal use? Cry me a river.

It was *never* "OK" to make copies that infringed copyright unless it fell under Fair Use. It is simply happening in such greater numbers now that it's newsworthy.

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