i do!!! all the time!!! i live on Grand Theft Auto and Medal of Honor on my Toshiba. Its better equipt than my desktop Dell which has broken 4 times in the past 4 years. I think i've only ever shut mine off once and that was to transport it on an airplane.

as for gateway breaking, mine actually caught on fire. i was treating it like i treat my toshiba, leave it on all the time, watch movies on it, play games (it was deadly slow for games), wake it up in the middle of the night to do forgotten homework, and one day it just had enough and shorted out. the desktop gateway that we used to have just up and stopped working a year after we got it. you couldn't turn it on, and the computer repair guy couldn't figure out what was wrong with it. so i've never been a gateway fan.

my dell desktop is ok, but their laptops aren't very powerful. they also have a short life. being a college kid you'll probably always be on it, always leave it on, listen to music, watch dvds, download stuff, and do your homework. you want something that can handle that kind of a workload and dell laptops are not the answer. they're horribly overpriced for their capabilities.

my boyfriend is a computer wiz and he dictated this all to me as we were sitting here. he put my toshiba package together for me and i love it to death and abuse the hell out of it.