Gateway GT5662 – MT – 1 x Phenom X4 9500 / 2.2 GHz – RAM 3 GB – HDD 1 x 500 GB – DVD?RW (?R DL) / DVD-RAM – Radeon HD 2400XT – Mdm – Vista Home Premium – AMD LIVE! – Monitor : none

Review by Ellie for Gateway GT5662 – MT – 1 x Phenom X4 9500 / 2.2 GHz – RAM 3 GB – HDD 1 x 500 GB – DVD?RW (?R DL) / DVD-RAM – Radeon HD 2400XT – Mdm – Vista Home Premium – AMD LIVE! – Monitor : none
Rating:
I think I got my money’s worth on this desktop PC. It has given me no problems in the few days I’ve had it; the setup was flawless (Vista is not a boogeyman, just a slowed and bejeweled windows XP); the speed and graphic card capability is impressive (DVI-D cable included along with a VGA cable); nice looking, well documented, color coded for cables; some bloatware easily removable but I am trying out the Norton Internet security software which has gotten good reviews; hard drive is a little noisy; good mouse and keyboard.

I think it’s a keeper. I’ve been waiting for a desktop with the Phenom quad-core chip and a decent graphic card. This is not for serious gamers, but for the rest of us it will certainly do. I am amazed how it handles the Google Earth display of 3D city scenes (when rotating them rapidly!). Twenty years ago, that would have required a Cray (a very costly research mainframe, for you younger computer enthusiasts).

It even comes with Vista on a restore disk! You don’t have to roll your own. It seems to have around 11 MB set aside for a restore partition, so you actually have closer to 450 GB available to you. I just went to the Canon website to find a Vista driver for my MP450 printer – no problem there. It drives my HP 2207 monitor perfectly using DVI-D.

You know, if you know Windows XP, you won’t have any trouble with Vista. I’ve found it very easy to navigate, no instability – just a lot of popups for verification that you want a particular program to run. Go to Control Panel > Additional Options > User Accounts and Family Safety > Change Your Windows Password > Turn User Account Control on or off > unclick the UAC button and click OK. Phew! Think how long it took me to find that the first time! Now you will be a somewhat greater risk (so get WinPatrol – great program) but less hassled. Make that hard decision to choose risk over supposed safety.

The instability comes from Windows Explorer browser – it goes down regularly. Use it just long enough to download Firefox, the stable, fast, versatile browser that knowledgeable people love. So what? On XP on my laptop, I had programs like WinPatrol asking me the same thing, for my protection. Ethernet was just a plugin, no configuration problems. On Comcast, I’m getting 16 Mbps on downloads. But it doesn’t have Gigabit ethernet (1000Mbps), just 10/100 – good enough for me.

Some programs take advantage of all four cores, others just use one. Anyhow, you always have elbowroom. I had the intention of using this for HD video editing (when I get my HD cam, that is) and I think this baby can handle it.

I had thought of buying a Mac, but the Mac desktop costs $2500 or so and up for quad or eight core. Better quality hardware and operating system, but more than I need to spend to do what I do: surf, game a little, photo editing, Google Earthing, music collecting, and massively multi-tasking at times ( 40 browser tabs open along with five or ten other programs running).

This is my first Gateway ever. I might be back, someday. I believe Gateway was recently bought by Acer in Taiwan, to give them instant name recognition in the US. Both Gateway and AMD give you one or two special programs to make life a little easier: online storage (15GB) and a media program.

This is a powerful middle of the road desktop. Not for gaming freaks – Company of Heroes probably won’t shock you with its frame rates. But it might just get you through the next five years or more of technical progress without leaving you in the lurch – that’s something.

ADDENDA:

Using the above recommended Firefox browser, I have just counted the number of tabs I have open and was surprised to find it numbered seventy (70)! Decent speed, too. Not too shoddy! I might get to like this Gateway.

I just read the second reviewer’s experience and I feel for him. However, I noticed this is his only Amazon review. He didn’t buy his Gateway PC through Amazon. I looks like a bit of spite that he wants to spread throughout cyberspace. I wonder where else he as placed spiteful reviews.

But my experience after a week with this machine has been great! I’ve installed some of the software that I like to use and have had no problems. In fact, I’ve tuned it up a bit by reducing the number of programs in the startup lineup, defragmented it, deleted some bloatware and now it comes into the windows Vista desktop in one minute flat after being turned on.

I have shutdown the Google and Vista indexing since I find I, as a home user, never try to find old files. I have downloaded a program called ‘Space Time’ which is a Mac-like browser for serious surfers. It uses a lot of resources, but this machine takes it in stride. Not to put too fine a point on it, as Dickens was wont to say, I really like this Gateway GT5662 Quad core baby.

Make sure you keep up with the updates to your drivers for the ATI XT2400 card. They have a new Catalyst 3.0 Video Card control program and drivers. You can also find newer drivers for the ethernet card and other hardware. Also keep up on your updates for Windows Vista (SP1 due out mid March 2008 – 600MB+ download!), your security software (Norton Internet has been good so far for me), and browser updates (to patch those eternal security holes).

By the way, JR Music and Computer World, the supplier, has always shipped promptly and I’ve had no problems with a number of products I’ve bought from them.

Frankly, I’m upgrading this to five (5) stars in my rating. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to change number of stars in this review system. But I love it!

Review by E. Hillman for Gateway GT5662 – MT – 1 x Phenom X4 9500 / 2.2 GHz – RAM 3 GB – HDD 1 x 500 GB – DVD?RW (?R DL) / DVD-RAM – Radeon HD 2400XT – Mdm – Vista Home Premium – AMD LIVE! – Monitor : none
Rating:
I bought this system when the motherboard fried on my old Gateway 5082 (hopefully they fixed that little issue) after only 18 months.

One surprising thing is.. the video isn’t on-board.. there’s actually a card (with dual monitor support!).. it’s not top of the line.. but it pushes Battlefield 2 and World of Warcraft pretty well.

Vista.. as well as the upgraded connections for hard drives (from IDE) makes integrating your old stuff a royal pain, hardly worth it.

Major Annoyance.. when you hit the button to eject a CD/DVD/CDROM.. you’ll catch your finger on the flap as the thing opens – design flaw.

All in all, it’s a nice system.. not really noticibly faster than my old one.. but for the price, who can argue?

Review by Jason Pearson for Gateway GT5662 – MT – 1 x Phenom X4 9500 / 2.2 GHz – RAM 3 GB – HDD 1 x 500 GB – DVD?RW (?R DL) / DVD-RAM – Radeon HD 2400XT – Mdm – Vista Home Premium – AMD LIVE! – Monitor : none
Rating:
I purchased this computer in April, 2008 from Circuit City. As we now know, they went out of business, but luckily this computer has been amazing. I do a lot of work on computers, and I have several around, including two HP models, and an Emachines about the same age, and this Gateway is by far the best. I am a multi-tasker. I have 6 open programs running, music playing, and about 12 browser windows open right now, and it still works like a charm. 500GB hard drive is more than enough, even though I am a “power user”. There is nothing this computer cannot do. I bought this as a Christmas present to myself, but I was researching until April. This was the best one for the buck, and it was a good pick.

Review by Rastaman for Gateway GT5662 – MT – 1 x Phenom X4 9500 / 2.2 GHz – RAM 3 GB – HDD 1 x 500 GB – DVD?RW (?R DL) / DVD-RAM – Radeon HD 2400XT – Mdm – Vista Home Premium – AMD LIVE! – Monitor : none
Rating:
I bought this computer last summer and it’s been the best one I’ve owned and use personally. Based on performance of this Gateway we bought a 2nd Gateway LX6810-01 back in March ‘09 as a 2nd computer for the wife and we’ve been having some overheating issues with it that we hope to fix with an additional cooling fan. In the meantime that one continues to randomly shutdown if we don’t have a fan blowing through the vent on the side of the case. And yet this GT 5662 is working great and has no issues of this regard so far. I do a good job of opening it up and blowing out all the dust to help keep it running in good shape.

This computer is plenty fast for all of my needs which have been repeated by other reviews for this machine. I don’t play really high end games or anything but it seems to work well with World of Warcraft, Call of Duty 4, etc. And it works great for surfing, dvd watching, music listening, etc. For now, my son is enjoying my old 2003 Dell Dimension 4550 which seems to work well for his needs at the moment. This machine had Windows Vista 32 bit and works great. And the wife’s LX6810-01 is even better for games because of it’s better video card (1 GB) and more ram (8 GB’s) and Windows Vista 64 bit. Hopefully, the cooling fan issue will be resolved soon because otherwise it’s a very good computer too. I look forward to testing it out on some video editing and gaming in the near future once that little issue is resolved.

Is there room for improvement on the GT5662? Sure. But all and all I feel confident giving this machine 4 stars because it’s very good for all around uses.

Review by P. Ronaghan for Gateway GT5662 – MT – 1 x Phenom X4 9500 / 2.2 GHz – RAM 3 GB – HDD 1 x 500 GB – DVD?RW (?R DL) / DVD-RAM – Radeon HD 2400XT – Mdm – Vista Home Premium – AMD LIVE! – Monitor : none
Rating:
I recently bought the Gateway GT5662 and honestly, this is a very good computer. It runs programs effortlessly, the AMD Phenom has great power. The computer only uses about half the RAM most of the time, so you can continuously run more and more programs without hassle. The only problem I’ve ever had with this computer would be Vista. It ALWAYS seems to have a problem some how. Granted, Vista looks nice and is smooth running when it is done loading. But, there are still problems needed to be fixed. The computer comes with pre-installed software like most PC’s now-a-days do. Data Transfer from USB drives and other devices are amazingly fast. When I bought this computer I only payed about.. $550 for it. So, this really is a great mid-range PC for the buck. Definitely a great purchase.