Gateway G7-600 8/10

DJ Voice 2001 Mark - 100

This Pentium III 600 MHz is a run-of-the-mill machine. The large IDE hard disk can hold alot of audio data, and the bundled 10/100 makes it useful as a backup machine in your network. Don't expect amazing performance, if you're looking to play 12 audio tracks at once with effects you'll suffer occasional dropouts. It can however cope with 8 tracks with minimal effects without any noticeable lag.The bundled soundcard is the usual Sound Blaster 128, which is not any good - so I upgraded to a Live Value. The output is clean and certainly good for most purposes. The bundled monitor is good but you can upgrade to a Vivitron monitor which offers slighly better quality output (although having owned both a standard and vivitron monitor, I would not bother paying the extra £50!). The graphics card is the reasonable ATI Rage 128 16 MB, which is a good all rounder, giving you the capability to view your desktop at high resolutions and high refresh rates. There is no DVI output however.

I would like to point out that the customer services were not to helpful when I bought this machine though! One major bonus is the fact that this computer comes in a full size case. Consequently you have access to four drive drives and space for a further three hard drives. Few other machines can match the G7-600 for expansion space. There is no network card on the motherboard, so if you want a network card, it will take up a PCI card. The network card provided by Gateway is a standard 10/100 3com card, which is easy to install and maintain. On the removeable drive front, there is a DVD drive with an included software DVD player.

This machine is fine if your are looking for a cheap solution to most of your hard disk space and processor power problems. Certainly if you are only running Fruityloops etc the machine is fine. The software bundle includes Microsoft Works and Microsoft Word.