I have never bought a laptop in my life, save for a very old refurbished IBM a couple of years. I found a christmas deal for a Gateway NV57H58U which seems pretty sweet, and my experience with other Gateway products has been fine, but I never tried their notebooks. Thus the question on the subject line - What do you think about Gateway laptops? Any good or bad experiences you can share about this brand are appreciated.
 
Here's a link with the specs for the one I'm interested in: http://us.gateway.com/gw/...ent/model/LX.WZG02.004
 
For reference: I want a laptop so I can do my work-related stuff (fiddling with Excel, Word, Outlook and Skype) away from home. (I work from my home, but I can't stand being in the same room all day long.) But most importantly, I need a laptop that can handle some basic "music workstation" tasks - Creating music in Fruity Loops, recording with Adobe Audition, or even playing keyboard using the Kontakt 5 VST (I'd be using the laptop together with an M-Audio Fast Track Ultra for the last two).
 
Cheers.

They seem to be as good as any of the other major manufacturers.  Looks like a good deal for $500.  I just got an Acer cheapo laptop with a quad-core AMD processor and 8gb of ram for $450 so the price for an i5 name-brand laptop seems reasonable.  I think I would personally choose gateway over dell.  My experience with dell throughout the years has been mostly negative while I've never had problems with gateway machines, but I'm sure you will find people who say the exact opposite.  

In my experience it matters very little what make of laptopm you get, much more the actual hardware. There's some important things you should consider, though, which don't immediatley jump out of a specification list, like keyboard quality (is it arranged how you want, does it have a numpad and would you perfer if it it did/didn't, are the function keys well placed, etc). Just read a whole bunch of reviews, basically. One design flaw can really damage how good a laptop is for you, much more so than a tower PC.
 
From the sound of what you need to do, a decent processor for the music tasks could be something to focus on - though pretty much any medium range processor should be okay provided you're not using loads and loads of tracks.
 
I have a similar laptop (specs wise) to that one, and it works for me. 3 USB ports seems small though, but sadly they don't come with many more... get a hub if you need to attach more than 3 devices on a regular basis.

Gateway has become absolute crap since the company was sold to the Chinese. There was a day when I liked GW2K, but that day has long since passed.