forum threadDr.W posted Jan 04, 2026 12:54 PM
Item 1 of 1
forum threadDr.W posted Jan 04, 2026 12:54 PM
Refurb: Gateway Slim Notebook: 14.1" FHD IPS, Ryzen 5 3500U, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD $174.59
$175
$250
30% offWoot!
Get Deal at Woot!Good Deal
Bad Deal
Save
Share
Leave a Comment
12 Comments
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
Wanted to add I specialize in low budget consumer tech and wanted to mention this would be fine doing your daily things like watching YouTube and Facebook Marketplace and office apps along with any light gaming through 2016, so most steam favorites that aren't fps online shooters. This would be an excellent minecraft and coding setup for someone getting into vibe coding or doing school work. It's a very capable little machine when you aren't forced to use online cloud products that force the RAM to constantly churn
Wanted to add I specialize in low budget consumer tech and wanted to mention this would be fine doing your daily things like watching YouTube and Facebook Marketplace and office apps along with any light gaming through 2016, so most steam favorites that aren't fps online shooters. This would be an excellent minecraft and coding setup for someone getting into vibe coding or doing school work. It's a very capable little machine when you aren't forced to use online cloud products that force the RAM to constantly churn
Sign up for a Slickdeals account to remove this ad.
That one had a surprisingly good build being all metal with IPS screen and ~3 lbs. The main limitation was the single channel ram.
These days if you can be patient a little and spend $25 more wait for the Vivobook 14 deal from Best Buy that has come back several times. For $200, you get an i3-1315u which will be 1.5x faster.
My daily driver is a MacBook Pro 16 so I know what a high quality laptop should be.
For the price, I find the gateway to be perfectly fine for normal use. The main downside is the body is pretty flex and creaky so no "premium" feeling but is strong enough so you don't feel like it is going to break. The webcam adequate but not great. The trackpad is a bit small but precise and accurate so I'm not bothered by it compared to the Mac trackpad which is huge and super nice. The fingerprint reader works quickly, faster than the one on the MBP. The keyboard is prob the weakest point, kinda mushy so I wouldn't want to write a huge paper on it. Screen is surprisingly nice, good contrast and color, not washed out, bright enough for indoor use, haven't tried it in the sun.
There are no crashes (any more than expected from Windows) and no boot loops. The battery did puff up after a few years (as did my other cheap HP laptop and my previous 2014 MacBook Pro) but the bottom pops off with some screws and you can swap out the battery with a cheap replacement, one connector and its as good as new.
I also partitioned and installed Linux Mint as dual boot and it also works fine. The only annoyance is that the clock (time zone actually) is wrong after you switch back from Mint to Windows, but that is a problem with Linux-Windows switch that happens on every computer (yes, I know you can put a script to fix it)
Leave a Comment