Pros: Ubuntu worked great. vSphere also.

Cons: Preinstall of Windows was so full of junkware it was unusable.

Overall Review: NIC was not ESXi friendly, so I had to get a Intel NIC for an extra $20. No biggie and to be expected.

Pros: 1) Cheapest laptop you can get at the time with hardware virtualization at the time. 2) Keyboard also feels nice. 3) Best battery life out there for someone like me who does video editing and virtualization on a train 2 hours a day

Cons: 1) When opening the unit the screen will actually bend, it's so thin. 2) The keyboard started rubbing off some sort of black stuff which ended up on the screen (it cleaned away). 3) The standard Windows 7 mouse driver will randomly stop detecting, you need to use the Dell one. 4) Unit's time is moving too fast in the BIOS, it gains over an hour in less than a week. Still arguing with dell after several flash upgrades and reimages later. 5) screen is dull and unimpressive, often the color black looks more dark grey no matter how many times i adjust the settings.

Pros: Small case, cheap too.

Cons: Sadly the power supply sits low making the standard fans with the intel processes useless. Make sure to order a low profile fan.

Pros: Cheap and fast. Works great in mac. But it's only a quad core.

Cons: Fan is freaking huge and loud.

Pros: Cheap

Cons: Has racing/air fins on it, which make it non-standard sized. Make it unusable in my case. Box should clearly note that it's non-standard.

Pros: Price was just what I needed to for lab machine. Virtualizes great thanks to the Q6600.

Cons: Machine was randomly rebooting itself and reporting the problem to eventvwr as a disk controller error. After a brief search through gateway support I found was that there was a BIOS issue on these. It seems this is the reason so many online vendors are selling these used, and cheap. They were supposed to be patched at Gateway but most were not it seems according to my research. You will have to download a patch and run it to resolve the issue (30 minutes, tops). Since then not a single issue. That's saying a lot for a Vista machine. If you are planning any video editing, gaming etc. this machine will need a video upgrade out of the box. The included video card is unusable for any sort of real gaming or graphics work. Lastly, the machine is packed FULL of junkware. You will spend about 3-4 hours uninstalling ads, junkware, bad games, trial software and custom driver interfaces.

Overall Review: Certainly a great all around box for the family and at the price a fun toy for IT pros given it's Q6600.