Gateway 7422G series AMD64 notebook

WHAT HAPPENS when you take a nice design like the eMachines M6810, upgrade the already fast 64-bit Athlon processor to a faster 3400+ (2.2Ghz) one with 1600 MHz system bus, increase the hard drive space to 80 GB, double the ram to a whopping 1 GB, replace the LCD with an improved "Ultrabright" one, and finally add DVD-writing to the mix?. Well, you get the Gateway 7422 series.

Gateway 7422 and eMachines M6810 side by side

After the folks at Gateway.com read late last year the story about my purchase of one eMachines notebook (see "eMachines M6810 is one Athlon 64 beauty"), they surprisingly decided to ship me their latest model for the first quarter of 2005, the 7422 series. After a long adventure with the customs and courier bureaucracy -which will be the subject of a separate article- I had the unit in my hands in late February.

So now, after about two months of daily use, and countless experiences including installing my favourite linux distro on it (preserving the WinXP partition, a.k.a. dual-boot), here's my report on this Gateway souped-up AMD64 notebook that replaces the eMachines M68XX line.

The eMachines M6810

The Gateway 7422 series, notice the higher glare on the "Ultrabright" LCD screen. However this disappears once the OS boots up and you get any image on screen.

The company seems decided to market all their AMD64 notebooks under the Gateway brand and leave the eMachines brand for low-end desktop systems. I immediately realized after taking it out of the box that the 7422 is externally the same Arima-based design of the M6810, but with updated cpu, ram, disk, dvd-writer, and LCD screen. One small difference: it now sports a new look consisting of an all-metal-gray LCD lid and of course, the Gateway logo, instead of eMachines'. But believe me, despite the external size and shape similarities, those internal changes are enough to put the 7422 in a superior league.

At 7.5lbs, this isn't as heavy as P4 heavyweights like the VAIO PCG-FRV26 and its wide-screen makes it a perfect "desktop PC replacement". The best change under the hood in the 7422 vs the M6810 is the memory, as it comes with 1 GB ram (expandable to 1.5 GB); this speeds the booting of the OS and loading of apps significantly.

The second noticeable change is the new LCD display, to which Gateway refers to as "Ultrabright" or "Ultrabrite" depending on who you ask. By removing the anti-glare coating (the M68xx screen had anti-glare coating which gives its screen a definitely matte finish) and increasing its default brightness and contrast, the 7422's "Ultrabright" screen shows more vivid and brighter colours, rivalling Sony's "ClearBright". The rest of the LCD specs remain the same, 15.4-inch wide screen (WXGA) running at a maximum resolution of 1280x800 pixels.

The software side The machine ships with Windows XP Home SP2. As you can imagine, this is very unexciting from a computer geek's point of view, but we will resolve this later, keep reading. Whether or not one would be able to fight for a refund, or obtain this notebook without an operating system pre-loaded in case one wants to install Linux, Solaris x86 or any other OS remains to be seen.

The WinXP desktop as shipped is notably clean and with a nice bright background wallpaper, with icons to launch the software for the "MSN" and AOL proprietary online services (the AOL one apparently comes pre installed and with three months of free service. The MSN one is apparently just a link to the installer dropped somewhere on the hard drive.

Gateway 7422's WinXP SP2 desktop

The installed software includes Mcafee anti-spyware, with its annoying "McAfee security centre" pop-up that, along with the bundled Norton Antivirus 2005, pester you to no end with their "pop-ups" on the lower right corner of the screen, until you do register or activate their services. Also included is "BIGFIX" an utility that is supposed to download "important announcements" from Gateway.com's site and display alerts about impending catastrophes. However, that beast eats up a lot of ram and stays idle ... to be blunt I never found a use for BigFix, not even in my eMachines when I boot windows. After all, isn't WindowsUpdate supposed to let us know and download security fixes and patches? Why re-invent the wheel?. But I disgress...

Plenty of Microsoftian software is included: "Microsoft Picture-It Photo Premium 9" (a graphics and photo editor, and yes, its name is that long apparently ;), Microsoft Works, Microsoft Money 2004 (which displays an annoying "discover more" pop-up window trying to sell you on the wonders of even more Microsoft products that you can buy), and of course the usual suspects that are tightly tied into every windows installation: WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER, WINDOWS MESSENGER, and WINDOWS MEDIA PLAYER 10.

I just wonder if this will ever stop, or if they'll continue leveraging their Windows near-monopoly and the OS+Office cash cows, bundling more and more unprofitable products until all competition is vanished. If AdobeCromedia and the smallest players like Paint Shop Pro's Jasc software don't do something, I guess they'll find out that nobody will need their software one day, after all "what comes with Windows serves my needs just fine" some will surely say).

One great thing: a simple "Gateway Documentation" folder is easily reachable from Start->Programs and contains the User's guide, the Wireless User's Guide and "Using your computer" documents, as simple links to PDF files. No idiotic animated win32 executables or other nonsense as I've seen in other systems, just the bare manuals as PDF that you can print or read using the also included Adobe Reader 6 at your leisure. Great and simple!.

Continuing with the "plus" side: burning CDs and DVDs is handled through NERO EXPRESS v6.3.17, a very intuitive and with a "simplified" (wizards-centered) version of the full Nero Burning Rom 6.x program. And, for a change, Sun Microsystem's Java2 VM comes also pre installed, so there's no need to either use Microsoft's brain dead abandonware JVM or go fetch Sun's latest. It's there. Kudos to Gateway on this one. Compared with the M6810 software bundle, there's one notable absence: eMachines bundled the Netscape 7.0 browser based on the Mozilla Suite. The Gateway 7422 just includes MS IE as a browser. Hey Netscape 8 team!, hey, Moz Foundation! here's a chance for you two to compete for Gateway's desktop icons!.

This concludes my evaluation of the bundled and pre installed software. It should serve most people's needs fine but you know I'd wish to see Firefox, Mozilla Suite, or Netscape in there, not to mention StarOffice 7 or OpenOffice.org, which is free and wouldn't cost them a dime.

Measuring up

I decided to run the familiar and recently reviewed Passmark Performance Test 5.0, so I could compare this 7422 vs its older sibling, the M6810, along with other popular notebooks (I'm perfectly aware that some of the models included don't have a matching CPU or speed, that's not the point, the point is to illustrate for instance "how does it compare to the popular IBM T40?"). Going back to the eMachines vs Gateway comparisons, the results were astonishing, scoring between 13 and 18% faster than the M6810 on CPU tests. And to my surprise, it beat the IBM Thinkpad T40 with its Pentium-M in the cached memory read, clearly the 1M cache in the Athlon64 is paying up at these higher clock speeds.

Passmark PT 5.0 - Graphics results

Graphics results need a separate paragraph, actually Gateway seemed to cut costs in the 7422 by using an ATI 9550 instead of the 9600 of the eMachines. I'm not a graphics expert like our resident Fuad, but after simple googling on the web I found a report labelling the 9550 as "an under-clocked version of the Radeon 9600, running at 250 MHz rather than 325 MHz". However, it should be noted that the 9550 is in effect what I call a "true graphics chip" because it uses its own 64 MB of dedicated video ram, instead of using shared system ram like low-end chipsets (I still hate the ATI IGP-345M in my former Sony VAIO). But the difference is hinted even from the outside. While the eMachines had a nice sticker with the full text "Graphics by ATI (logo) Mobility Radeon 9600 (with the 9600 number in bigger letters)", the sticker on the Gateway just says "Graphics by ATI".

Clearly the folks at Gateway thought, and to my surprise with good reason, that the faster CPU could nullify any negative effects of the slightly lower clocked graphics chipset. The Gateway with the 9550 ends up beating the higher-clocked 9600 in the 2d lines, rectangles, 2d shapes and even "fonts and text" tests, by a margin ranging from 0.2 to 10.8%). The only test where the eMachines with its R9600 was faster than the 7422 and its Radeon 9550 was in the "GUI" tests. It seems that windows GUI drawing is not optimized to make use of DirectX routines that take advantage of the faster CPU, one might conclude.

In the Passmark "simple 3d" tests, the Gateway scored 5% slower than the eMachines and its R9600, but in every other 3d test, the Gateway scored better: 0.9% faster on the "Medium" 3D test and 0.8% faster than the eMachines on the "complex" 3d test. nVidia fans can rejoice, however, knowing that the nVidia chip on other notebooks with slower cpus score higher on 3d tests than any notebook with an ATI one included as part of this comparison. However, the ATI chipset in the Gateway and eMachines systems manages to perform faster than systems with an nVidia card in a number of 2D tests. So, like always, "it's all relative".

Below you will find just the "Mark" totals (average scores) given by PassMark PT 5.0, if you want to see the long long list of score results, I've uploaded those to my own site over there.

Passmark ratings for the different subsystems

Linux adventures

Sun's JDS Linux R2, which is based on an old but very stable 2.4 suse kernel (with KDE fluff removed and replaced with GNOME 2.2 as the default) installed flawlessly, with sound and video coming up, albeit at 1024x768 rather than 1280x800. After the first boot, sound was recognized and working, as well as the touch pad, dvd-rw drive, usb ports and the cardbus slot. I plugged my Umax 1220S scanner over the pcmcia port and scanned an image with XSANE, then I played a MP3 and tuned into an internet radio streaming with Real.

Gateway 7422 running Java Desktop System R2

So the basic functionality works out of the box. I updated the video drivers to ATI's official linux ones (see below). In case you're in a hurry, you can find my tweaked XF86Config configuration file that enables full 1280x800 mode (for ATI's drivers) here.

I originally had to do a bit of hair pulling before Sun JDS linux recognized the notebook's built-in ethernet, but it turns out it was all a matter of loading the YAST2 configuration program, removing all detected network adapters (for some reason, the built-in wifi card is mistakenly detected first as a broadcom wired ethernet nic and configured as the primary lan, even while it doesn't work on linux until you install additional software).

Linux Video on the Gateway 7422 is a no-brainer

Most linux distros will have no problem detecting and working with the Gateway 7422GZ's ATI Radeon 9550, as it's a "real" graphics chipset and not a "brain damaged" chipset like the "IGP3xx" series. Here you have not one but three choices of graphics drivers: you can use the drivers that come with the linux distro (Xfree86 4.x or X.org), you can use the proprietary ATI official drivers (available here and last updated two weeks ago), or, you can choose to install the commercial Scitech SNAP for Linux product, which I reviewed some time ago.

Sadly, the firm confirmed to the INQ that it has "no near term plans to offer a Linux option". However, Gateway's PR spokeswoman kindly promised to forward my feedback over to the "product team". In the meantime, I guess the folks selling JDS linux-preloaded systems will receive the news with joy.

It really would be nice to have a few brave PC manufacturers that are not afraid of facing the Ballmer Yelling.

But leaving company politics aside, the good news is that the Gateway 7422 is one great system to install linux into. (Btw: did anyone notice how conveniently the WindowsRefund.net site that we mentioned in our article of late last year has apparently gone off-line?).

Buy one, if you can

I wish that Gateway improved its online reach, as notebooks like this one deserve to be near everyone. While notebooks from Apple, Sony, HPAQ and Toshiba are ubiquitous on online sellers, the Gateway distribution seems to have the same issues these days that I encountered months ago when I discovered the eMachines line. For instance, you can find Gateway's 7426GX and 7326GZ listed in online retailer Amazon.com, but try finding a 7422GX or GZ in stock.

Since Amazon.com is a retail behemoth with $6.92B in revenues and a net income of $588.5M for the FY which ended last Dec, sometimes I wonder how some companies can afford not to have their full product line available on such popular online venue. (Note: I'm not affiliated with Amazon.com in any way, I just tend to like the site even while I have a love- hate relationship with them as a long time customer).

The verdict

Gateway surprised me with this one. They improved upon the eMachines legacy while the keeping the price down to earth (at $1399 greenbacks, it's less than what I paid for my eMachines M6810 back in September '04). The cosmetic "cracking hinge" problems that plagued some of the emachines notebooks -and which only affected the exterior plastic cover, not the hinge mechanism itself, it should be noted- seems to be gone. I've been opening and closing the LCD lid several times a day, carrying the notebook in a briefcase back and forth, and still not a dent. I say it and I will continue to say it: any of these systems preloaded with a decent linux distro would be a killer. It just takes a company with some guts to face the Wrath of The Ballmer.

I give this notebook four point five (4.5) Fernandos in my personal one-to-five rating scale. I will try to hold onto this one for as long as I can, so expect coming reviews of every OS on earth (from Solaris 10 x86 to the latest OS/2 and why not, BeOS! ;) running on this beautiful machine!. µ

L'INQS
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Bargain AMD Athlon64-powered eMachines notebooks
Snap video drivers for Linux (review)