Like many, I wanted to avoid the whole Vista fiasco, so the Gateway FX6831-03 is my first new computer in seven years.
You only have to look at the specs: I7-860 processor, ATI5850 video card and an insane 16 gig of DDR3 memory to know this is a blazing fast machine at a modest price, so I'm going to talk about the out of the box stuff. I ordered the Gateway FX6831-03 desktop PC from Amazon via standard shipping and it arrived in good shape from J&R Music and Electronics in less than a week.
First, I opened it up to look inside. The case is crummy sheet-metal with screws, but the layout looks solid with no glaring problems and a big power supply (I've uploaded some photos into the "customer image" section). It has bays to add two more hard drives to its 1.5 TB drive (which is a bit slow). So far I've added a 1 TB Hitachi SATA internal drive to handle just HD video files. Setup was a bit tricky--I was expecting a simple plug and play, but I had to go into the device manager and format the drive before it would show up. It's all good now.
The interior is tight. Wedging in additional PC cards would be tough, though I would be hard pressed to think of what else to add. It has two disk drives--one CD/DVD burner and one Blu-ray player; I would prefer a single Blu-ray/DVD/CD burner.
The exterior is really sweet with red glowing racing stripes, an extremely fast multi-card reader and LOTS of USB ports (10!), FireWire, HDMI and more. You can nestle your iPod or MP3 player on a little indented platform on top, right next to two USB ports.
Turning on the Gateway FX6831-03 was a pleasant surprise. First there was a pretty good "whir" sound, then it settled down to dead quiet. I had to double-check that the fans were going!
The setup was a snap. I don't know which was better: the new machine or the 64 bit Windows 7 Home Premium. In any case, unlike my previous Windows machines, I was able to get on line in seconds instead of wasting half a day fiddling with settings.
Unfortunately, the computer has no setup disks, and the setup instructions were of the pathetic "don't use this machine in the shower" sort. After removing some bloatware and downloading about 50 updates (true!) I loaded and tweaked dozens of personal programs. Note: Windows 7 doesn't use Outlook Express--it uses Windows Live Mail. Also, Windows has a nice (free!) anti-virus Microsoft Security Essentials program that won't bog down the system. Simple stuff, sure, but it was new to me and much appreciated. Rebooting only takes about 60 seconds.
You can also use Windows Easy Transfer between your new and old machine, but it I couldn't make it work via USB cable, so I had to use an external hard drive. It takes several hours and is a bit buggy. Also, start planning on moving all your e-mails and e-mail addresses to your new machine.
Most of my old (some very old) programs work on the Gateway FX6831-03. High end products like Photoshop CS5, Photomechanic, Pinnacle Studio HD and games like Supreme Commander 2, Dragon Age and Age of Empires II are amazingly fast even at highest resolution! I've only had it a few weeks, but this machine is everything I could possibly want. Note of warning: Gateway is reported to have HORRIBLE customer support, but I figured it would be worth the risk. If I ever have a problem, I'll update this review.
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