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Disclaimer:
I am very long in DELL stock and an owner of a DELL 400Mhz PII. Very happy with it...
My own experience with Gateway.
As a engineer with a company in Northbrook IL, I was asked as a favor to help an investor with his home machine. I worked evenings as a consultant trying to sort out his PC problems. He had bought a Pentium 90 with all the bells and whistles which was the top of the line at the time.
I spend hours just trying to get through to Gateway customer service at least 3 times. When we did get through, their answer was usually very vague like you indicated. re-format the hard drive and re-install the software. They swapped mother boards, they swapped video cards, they send new CD rom drives. What they couldn't ever do despite their trying was fix the problems. As you indicated, their proprietary boards were not compatible with each other for anything but what they delivered. We were trying to load OS/2 in addition to Windows and could never get it all working. After 10 months of back and forth, and good faith efforts on both sides, my client decided to return the machine. Despite the fact that the problem report started within one month of getting the machine, Gateway claimed that we were OUT of warranty on the product and they would not accept it back.
My client who was fairly well healed at the time, brought the machine to a local white-box maker and had it remade using other parts into a machine that worked at his own expense. Most of the gateway boards ended up in a trash heap.
The experience, especially the frustration of not even being able to reliably contact Gateway customer service (due to wait times), convinced me to never buy a Gateway, and never recommend one to a friend or client. I have no idea if they have improved in the 3 years since this experience. I have no further information at all. I hope that this helps.
Craig |
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