On rare occasions I like to review some of the items I own. These won’t always be the freshest of reviews but they do reflect quite a bit of usage. This post is an odd one. Let’s back track a couple of years now.

I was out and about, looking for a monitor and happened to come across a Gateway 24″ monitor with HDMI inputs and built-in up-conversion. It was a steal at the time and my eyeballs are in all the more pain from staring at it over time. I love it. It has touch controls down the side, various settings for differing types of content, language settings and the works.

I followed this earlier this year when I needed a Windows box to run a few applications that I didn’t want to run under Bootcamp. I picked up a quad-core AMD Phenom system with 4gb ram, 320gb hard drive, Vista home premium. I was skeptical to say the least. I remember Gateway when they were still pretty much being sold out of a barn in South Dakota. You couldn’t miss their ads in (what used to be) the Computer Shopper brick that was a good couple of thousand pages each month. Aside from a couple of Vista issues and a slight driver issue I can’t say I am disappointed. In fact, I’ve been extremely happy with the build quality, the functionality, the silence.

So now that I’m in the process of starting on a new career I needed a Windows-based laptop to run a few applications that I can not run on my Mac. So after doing a lot of shopping around, I settled on a Gateway with a Core duo processor, 4gb ram and a good hard drive for ~$400 – I couldn’t pass the deal up. And now? It really kicks ass.

Gateway’s fate may have eroded over time but their system quality is about where it was at the height of all the kudos Gateway received for their systems in the early years. If you have the option available, I would recommend a Gateway – they tend to be very affordable with great quality.

If you’re wondering why I switched back (from Apple) – it all comes down to price. Apple is a pretty premium on otherwise decent computer. Had Apple possibly thought about updating the Mac mini, the story might have been different. Yet they had not touched it when I needed it.

Not that Vista is all that great. It looks and feels a lot like XP with a face lift. There are companies like Stardock who have been skinning XP for nearly a decade – Windows visual developers should have taken a queue from them instead of plopping down such a graphics whore.

Well, there’s always Windows 7….