Gateway M275
As laptops go, the Gateway M275 is one of the thinner offerings out there. At 1.3 inches high, this notebook computer should be one of the lighter ones as well, but it weighs in at around 5.7 pounds, including the modular DVD drive and battery, which puts it at the upper limit of the weight scale for supposed lightweight laptops. The reason might be because the other models are cheating by not including their batteries and modular drives, but good luck getting them to admit that.

Regardless, the M275 is still a very good laptop, with enough power to complete virtually any basic computing task that can be thrown at it, within reason. You wouldn’t want to do advanced weather calculations or compile millions of lines of code using this processor, but there are few out there who do that sort of thing. The Intel Pentium M CPU has a megabyte of level-two cache for greater speed in accessing the memory, and it also can be customized with up to 2 gigabytes of system memory. This memory runs at 333 megahertz, which is not really up to par with the latest laptop models, but still not too bad.

The graphics hardware is an onboard Intel 85822GME chipset with 2D hardware acceleration and 3D rendering acceleration, and it shares video memory with the system RAM. Again, this is not the fastest way of doing things, and it also sacrifices some system memory to the graphics processing hardware, but this setup is fine for doing regular computing tasks such as editing documents or surfing the web. Gamers would want a faster chipset anyway, and will go for another laptop model. The LCD screen is a respectable 14.1 inches diagonally, with an active matrix display for a brighter picture. This particular Gateway model is a tablet PC though, so the display can swivel around so that it’s sitting on top of the keyboard face up. You can then hold the M275 laptop like a book, and use the touchscreen to control the computer rather than using the keyboard and mouse.

Overall, the Gateway M275 is a good choice for the casual or entry level user. It is not a high performance machine, nor is it a particularly good gaming computer, but for someone who is looking for a tablet PC that has solid graphics and decent performance, the M275 would work just fine.