Gateway Parts

Need advice buying the Gateway NV5214u laptop. Is it the one for me?

I'm considering buying the Gateway NV5214u laptop from my local BestBuy. It's $449.99 and has a lot of good reviews by top reviwers, but on the BestBuy site, a lot of reviews from customers say the screen blacks out and requires you to hard reboot it. I've looked at a couple stores and this really seems to fit what I want with the price I'm looking for, but I can't have this blacking-out screen problem. I called BestBuy and the employee said out of the 50 that were purchased there, only one was returned due to that problem. He also said the reviews were based on a whole from everyone in the US, so it's not such a huge problem in our town. He also said I could return or exchange it in 2 weeks if something happened. So I need advice. Should I buy this laptop? What other things do I need to know that BestBuy hasn't told me? And for people who have this laptop, is it worth it? I'll be using it for picture storage, gaming (I wont be playing the newest games, FYI), streaming videos to LiveStream, video editing with Sony Vegas, and browsing the web and Youtube. Thanks!

Public Comments

1. I've had nothing but problems with Gateway computers. More dependable ones are Dell and HP.
2. Honestly, based on the vacuum of time that the two I have had in just less than 24 hours is any indication, I would pass. The screen blacking out would be minor if it happened when I wasn't using the thing. As it sits, I've lost about 300 words of text for a project and have spent probably 4 hours dealing with it. I called Gateway and they had me update the BIOS; which was fine except the revision they had me install was a lower number (1.03 vs. 1.12) then after that didn't work they wanted to do a system restore on a computer that had been booted up maybe 10 times.