Gateway to shutter stores, cut staff

TalkBack 10 of 28:

Next »

« Previous

• Thread View
• Flat View

2000 was when they went down hill

We (the place I work at) used to buy Gateway only. In 1999 their desktop and laptop systems were great. Very few problems and they were very configurable. Right around 2000, something started to go horribly wrong.

We were shipped about 100 E-4200 models which all contained quantum hard drives. Around 70% of them have died. After that model, which was okay aside from the defective hard drives, we started to by their AMD 'Select' machines and we absolutely loved them. To this day we've only had two out of the 25 or so Gateway AMD machines fail in any way. Unfortunetely, right after we started buying them they discontinued their AMD line and went strictly Intel.

We moved onto a different model, the E-3400 which was without a doubt the worst dekstop PC EVER manufactured by any company. Even Packard Bell couldn't hold a candle to these POS machines. They came with a Mother/Daughter board combo and weighed about 35 pounds - extremely heavy for a desktop. The problems we had with this model were endless. One the first 50 or so we bought came with motherboards which had defective capacitors - 80% of them ended up going bad. The ones which had the updated motherboard model still had motherboard problems, and we constantly had to reseat the motherboard into the daugterboard. Quite a few of power supplies also would go out, and yes they still used Quantum 'Fireball' hard drives. 'Fireball' was a very appropriate name for Quantum drives, as on two seperate occasions I actually witnessed balls of fire bursting from the chipset of the drives as they went dead.

Things went equally bad on the laptop side of things, at about the same time their desktops went downhill.

I just replaced my Gateway Solo 2550 laptop - the last good laptop Gateway made. After the 2500/2550 models, we purchased about 50 Solo 5300/5350's. These laptops seemed slower than the 2550's even thogh they came with processors that were twice as fast, and they were very flaky. Weird things would happen with these laptops. The mouse would stop working and then work again after a reboot, they would freeze, reboot themselves, not recongnize the docking station you placed them in - and all of the things that went wrong were so intermittent that you couldn't ever reproduce them!

While the newer laptops were somewhat bearable, the E3400 model deesktop is what drove us to stop buying Gateway products. Right now the last few Gateways we've bought are finally going out of warrantee and I'm glad - it's a great reason to replace them.

Posted by: toadlife   Posted on: 04/01/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• The True Costs of Virtual Server Solutions VMware In an economic environment that is repeatedly heralding the message "do ... Download Now
• The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments VMware Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to ... Download Now
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Iinfrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now