Some plans just don’t go to plan.

About a month ago, I outlined how I was gonna pick up a nice new laptop for $1300.  So much for that plan.

Other budgetary concerns made getting that laptop a momentary exercise in futility.  So on Labor Day, I wandered into Best Buy with a much smaller pile of money and eventually stumbled over what had to be one of the best deals in the entire store.

The Alternative New Hotness

It’s a Gateway NV59C, a 15.6″ laptop with a Core i3 processor putting out 2.26Ghz.  It comes with 4GB of ram, a 320GB hard drive, Intel HD Graphics and a price tag of only $499.  A pretty good deal, considering the vast majority of laptops in this price range are smaller (under 14″), slower (Pentiums, Celerons and Semprons are NOT that fast), featureless (2GB of ram or less) and just plain cheap feeling (just check out the laptops at your local Wal-Mart.  You’ll see what I mean).  Aside from some plastic flex near the DVD tray, this thing is pretty solid.  The resolution isn’t as big as I want it to be (it’s only 1366×768), but all of the consumer-grade laptops have that “widescreen” resolution these days.

One beef with the Gateway is how it’s equipped with Intel HD graphics.  For those who aren’t technologically savvy, it’s an “onboard” graphics solution that’s popular in both cheap laptops and laptops built for high battery life and portability.  It’s not only integrated with the Core i3 CPU, but it’s also supposed to be an upgrade from the old Intel GMA 4500HD or whatever graphics solution that was slower and more feeble.  Just don’t try to play any of the latest PC games like Modern Warfare 2 on it.  That won’t work.  But it does suffice for Photoshop/Illustrator work and hey, it can handle High Def Blu-Ray movies…..if it had a Blu-Ray player.

The other beef?  Only three USB ports thanks to the HDMI port taking up a slot.  Personally, I’d rather have a eSATA port or even a powered USB port for recharging my phone.  Last but not least is the keyboard.  Not only does it lack that spring that’d make typing that much quicker for me, but the “floating” design makes it piss-easy for debris to get under the damn keys.  SMDH.

All in all, it’s proven to be a rather decent buy, as I work hard to make the money I spent on it back and then some.  The design is very attractive and the battery lasts at least 5 hours on the lowest power settings.  Hopefully this will give me a chance to prepare for newest line of laptops sporting the “Sandy Bridge” architecture in early 2011.