Gateway Solo 9300
Back when it was still being sold, the Gateway Solo 9300 laptop was known for its ability to conserve battery life by reducing the clock speed of the processor when it was running on battery power. That, combined with its Mobile chipset ensured that the user could work on battery power for hours and not have to recharge.

With a choice between Intel’s Mobile Celeron, Mobile Pentium II, or Mobile Pentium III, the Solo 9300 had some very good computing power back in its day. Clock speeds ranged from 333 megahertz in the Pentium II to 700 megahertz in the Pentium III, and each came with 256K of external cache, which was an acceptable amount at that time. These days, a good processor sports two levels of cache – a secondary amount of temporary memory acts as a cache for the original cache – but the smaller size of this cache does not require this advance. And the Solo 9300’s 32 megabytes of RAM was also in line with the norm during the early 2000’s.

Users had a choice between three sizes of LCD display; a 14.1 inch, 15.0 inch, or 15.7 inch diagonal width. The first two sizes had a maximum resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, with the latter having a resolution of 1280 x 1024, a high amount during that time period. The graphics controller was mid-range, with an ATI Mobility-P Video Graphics Accelerator and 8 megabytes of synchronous graphics random access memory. One nice feature on the Solo 9300 is that it supported simultaneous LCD, external monitor, and television NTSC output. This could come in handy when the user is giving a presentation and would like to hook the display up to a television or projector, but still wants to be able to see the LCD screen to control the show.

As to the portability, this is a heavy laptop, weighing in at 7.35 pounds for the 14 inch screen, 7.76 pounds for the 15 inch screen, and a whopping 8.61 pounds for the 15.7 inch screen. Even back then, the weight was a bit high for a portable computer, partly due to its height, at over one and a half inches for all three versions.

Overall though, the Gateway Solo 9300 was a good choice during its time period, with its power saving features and decent computing power. It wasn’t very fancy, but it got the job done.