I purchased two Gateway 700XL desktop computers in March of this year. I am very pleased with the price, performance, quality and support. I was planning to buy Dell or Hewlett-Packard after having had two IBM Aptivas from 1998 and before that Hewlett-Packard.
I watched carefully for a year or so for features and pricing versus waiting for the next coming performance or feature enhancement. Biting twice while the iron was hot on Dell only to be frustrated by errors, back-orders and "gotchas" on their pricing or features, I tried to buy an HP. At that time they simply did not offer anything close to what I wanted. I decided to educate myself and build my own top-of-the-line monsters from components. After more months, it became evident Gateway offered the exact same thing I wanted for about a thousand dollars less than the best price I could find. A quick recheck of Dell showed they were $500 more than the Gateway but also had not standard mother board, less OPEN slots and several other gotchas that I considered deal killers.
I was very suspicious of Gateway because the price seemed to good to be true, but have since discovered I had no reason to doubt them.
Make sure to ask all your important questions upfront to make sure you understand what you are getting meets your needs. You can often also check for deals at
dealcatcher.com or
fatwallet.com or similar.
In my case, Gateway made some significant upgrades to the processor, sound card and extra memory shortly after my computers arrived. By demanding a return authorization to send mine back so I could "start over", they sent everything needed to upgrade mine (new motherboards, sound cards, memory chips, etc.) They were really very cool about it.
I am one happy camper. |
