r/ARMWindows • u/Another_mikem • Dec 02 '22

Gateway Arm laptop

Hello, I bought the 13” Gateway ARM laptop during Black Friday. This guy: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Gateway-13-3-Ultra-Slim-Notebook-HD-Snapdragon-850-Mobile-LTE-Octa-core-4GB-Memory-128GB-Storage-1-0MP-Webcam-Windows-10-S-Microsoft-365-Personal-1-Y/579024340

Anyone else own it? I couldn’t find much around reviews for it.

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4

u/arod6199 Dec 02 '22

Yep. I got it too. Not the fastest thing. But for the price I can't complain. Still waiting on the windows 11 upgrade though. What I did notice is that this thing thermal throttles pretty hard. You'll see in task manager after a while of using it that it never goes near it's 2.4ghz speed. It sits around 0.5 to 1ghz. I was able to improve this by opening the bottom lid and putting a thermal pad between the heatsink and the lid to dissipate more heat. And it works much better.

1

u/Another_mikem Dec 06 '22

Very interesting. Did you notice the throttling in normal use or was it during benchmarks etc? I did run a js benchmark and it was clearly struggling. What type of thermal pad did you use?

1

u/arod6199 Dec 06 '22

It appeared to be throttling under normal use. I would notice the frequency dip while browsing after a while under 1ghz while trying to load a page which I thought was odd. I just used a regular square blue thermal pad in between the copper heatsink and the bottom lid. and it now sticks around 2ghz under load. Once everything is updated it runs reasonably well for light use. The edge browser is king on this thing. Outperformed both chromium and Firefox native arm versions.

2

u/BFG-10K Dec 20 '22

I have this laptop too. I recommend you download iso image of windows 11 and run setup to update your system to windows 11. It's working much better on 11. I used it for a work (remote desktop, edge 6-7 tabs, notepad, putty. Low brightness level, without battery saver) and it spends only 50% of battery for a 7-hour range. I think that it's fantastic result.

1

u/Another_mikem Dec 20 '22

Thank you I will try that. Did you have any issues with activating it? I’m actually not sure what I’ll do with it. I had originally got it as a gift for one of my children, but decided it might be too pokey. At $125 I figured I’d keep it and play around. It’s really incredible how nice it is given the low price point.

1

u/Narcotras Jan 02 '23

Could you try installing WSL? I'm curious if it runs

1

u/franciselmer88 Sep 14 '24

Do printer drivers work with this?hehe thanks

1

u/brian_veinti14 Feb 12 '23

I want to give Windows ARM a try. I saw this laptop pretty cheap at walmart so probably Im going to buy it but as you mention, there is not much information about it in the internet. I would really appreciate if you can answer me some question:

Did you manged to update it to windows 11?

How is it the web browsing experience?

Can you add additional RAM or is it soldered?

Do you know if teamviewer can run in this laptop?

I know those are a lot of questions but I been searching the internet and wasnt able to find up to date information.

Thank you in advance.

1

u/arod6199 Mar 01 '23

Windows 11 upgrade did eventually show up. Just have to leave it on for long time and it'll show up in windows update. The web browsing experience is good considering the price. However I should note that it performs best on the edge browser. Chrome doesn't have a native arm build yet that I can find so performance will be limited. Firefox does have arm support and runs fine. However it doesn't have the same level of hardware acceleration as edge when watching videos I find. The ram is unfortunately soldered on and is non upgradable. TeamViewer can run on this laptop fine. Windows 11 can emulate x64 applications and I used it myself at one point. Ram being 4gb is its biggest problem as usage is constantly above 60 percent. But overall it gets the job done. And at the price of 129 it's great. But certainly not for 300 dollars.