Junk in the Box

Many, many years ago, about 1987, I was a purchasing agent. The engineers wanted computers and the said buy Gateway, it's a good deal. I tracked it and we had about a 50 percent failure rate. Something was always wrong. Either a bad memory chip, or once, the fan fell out of the power supply. Over the years, I tracked their performance. Some people get good deals and their computers work fine. Others....well, let's say they won't be buying a Gateway again. It's sort of a crap shoot, and over theyears, I don't believe that they have improved that much. As an aside, in 1987 I bought a 286 from a company that designed and built the PC's from the ground up. The engineers told me I was paying too much because someone had to design all the components. I've upgraded the PC over the years, and it's still sitting on my desk with the original power supply and keyboard. Any 1987 Gateways out there?

I've posted many of times the horrors of Gateway while employed as a tech support in a call center. The quality of parts were pathetic, they had a red owl modem that had four pages of possible issues due to the defective modem that was in all pcs despite the known issues!! The first thing we would ask about or look up in the documentation of the pc always started with it. They also sell rivited pcs that are refurbished and sold as a special pc that were the biggest piece of you know what. Thesepcs were not to be opened or void warrantee constantly being replaced. The unknowing consumer would buy these due to their impressive power and specs for a low price only to learn they are not upgradable. These are just a few of the most amazing stories of poor quality I could go on for hours due to our call volume never dipping under 60 during a 24hr period. This was my first pc job where I didnt know anything, I was just a warm body to answer a phone. Next to no training like the Dell commercials promote, although Dell account was across the hallway in the same call center. Their ad campain was excellent with the custom building stores that people believed they were getting quality. Also, at the same time I worked for UPS and the Gatewayboxes were the most hated of all, these boxes were too big to properly load in trucks. This resulted in torture to the hated cow boxes as the most brutal cow tipping ever witnessed. This probably resulted in the defective motherboards. Sorry about your luck, but you are in a world of hurt, and this is just the tip of the iceberg.

they used to rock, but that was a long time ago now. Dell is pretty good now for ws's :)

We've recently installed a couple of hundred Gateways as part of a bulk order. They were a mix of E-series Desktops and the 450 series laptops. I don't recall having too many problems with defective machines.

On the other hand, a couple of months before these installs, we had two Gateways out of an order of three that required CPU replacements for their CPU replacements. But since they were under warranty, getting the replacements wasn't hard.

If your Gateway tech support person told you all that he/she should be fired for playing tech support and pretending to know what he/she is talking about. ;)

We've ordered near 80 gateways for work here in the past 20 months (not my first decision, but it was a money thing -- plus we have Gateway as a client now so I think that had something to do with it).

Out of those 80 - I can say about 4 were DOA, and 2 more had issues with the on-board NIC not working correctly. The rest were fine.
You don't need the proprietary NIC -- that's a load of bull. And something sounds fishy that you had trouble using 3COM NICs with the Gateways. I had 3COM NICs installed in the ones here, I had zero problem installing them and getting them to work. We use Cisco and LinkSys switches -- zero problems with them working either.

I'm not saying Gateway is total quality -- personally I think NONE of the "canned" PCs are total quality, they all use cheap parts btw. How else do you think you get a ton of software the latest CPU a huge HDD and a flat panel for just about a grand?

They work fine for most business use IMHO, considering the average business just uses spreadsheets, email and word. ;)