WHAT'S HOT: The Gateway 500XL comes in a stylish black-and-silver midtower case. Goodies include a 120GB hard drive and a versatile DVD-RAM/R drive, which allows you to record to DVD-R discs that can play in many home DVD units as well as to archive data on 4.7GB single-sided or 9.4GB double-sided DVD-RAM discs. Combine the hardware with the two FireWire ports (one of which is conveniently located on the front panel) plus the bundled Pinnacle Studio 7.1 video editing software, and this system is a competent movie-making machine. Our review model also included a 40X/12X/48X CD-RW drive.

WHAT'S NOT: Though colors on the 17-inch Gateway FPD 1730 LCD monitor looked vibrant in our test photo, the monitor stumbled in our text quality tests. Characters on a newsletter and a screen with multiple font sizes were not as smooth and crisp as we've seen on other 17-inch LCDs, and in some places text looked downright smudgy. For an extra $100, you can upgrade to Gateway's much nicer 18-inch LCD monitor, which came with the 700XL we reviewed this month.

Expansion room is rather limited. As configured, our test 500XL had only one open slot for PCI cards (and only three total slots) and one open socket for additional memory (just two total). You can add an additional hard drive and a 3.5-inch removable media device, such as a Zip drive, but you'll have to move aside some cabling to access them.

WHAT ELSE: The 2.53-GHz Pentium 4 processor and 512MB of 266-MHz DDR SDRAM helped this 500XL rack up a score of 117 on our PC WorldBench 4 tests. That's slightly slower than similar systems we've tested, but it's still plenty fast.

The Boston Acoustics BA745 black-and-silver two-speaker-and-subwoofer system wasn't complicated to set up, thanks to color-coded ports and connectors. The sound quality was enjoyable, despite the speakers' small size--with strong but not overpowering bass. Individual sound elements (soloist, chorus, or piano, for instance) were easy to distinguish. Meanwhile, the keyboard does offer hot keys for launching applications, but unfortunately no audio controls.

Gateway provides enough guidance for easy set-up. A generic user manual has a clear and useful troubleshooting section, and the PC comes with a setup poster and primers for creating audio CDs.

UPSHOT: This 500XL has a well-rounded array of components geared toward home video editing projects. However, you should select a different monitor to get the best experience.

SUMMARY

Gateway 500XL $