Worst PC of all time - Which one gets your vote?

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Gateway E-3400

We bought dozens of these pigs at work about 5-6 years ago, and are just getting rid of the last few.

* They had a motherboard/daughterboard design, and the motherboard would have to be reseated into the daughterboard on several of the machines. Doing this was not easy.

* Due to the motherboard daughterboard/design, the case was huge. It was about 4 inches wider than a normal PC, and the case was pure steel with thick plastic shell covering it. The result was a PC that weighed in at around 40Lbs, and would not fit inside of cages we had bought to hold PC's under tables.

* The power supply was at the bottom of the case and was modular. It would plug in directly to the bottom of the daughterboard. Sometimes it would get loose, or it contacts would just become corroded and you would have to re-seat it to get the machine to power on.

* Despite the fact that just about all new PCS has ata66 HD controllers on board, this one didn't. because of this, gateway shipped them with PCI based promise ATA66 controllers. Besides it's performance being well below that of an on-board controller, the shipping drivers with this card would bluescreen Windows 2000 when you installed SP3. As a result we had to go out and update the drivers to all of these machines by hand.

* The e3400 came in 733mhz models and later 1000mhz models. In both models, every single component seemed to be the same - but the motherboard was slightly different. because of this the ghost image we had for one model would bluescreen on the other. The only way we could tell them apart was to turn them on and look at the BIOS ID on the screen. Thus we had to maintain two ghost images labeled with the BIOS ID.

* The power supplies, mother/daughter boards, and hard drives all failed at a very high rate. The hard drives (Quantum fireballs) were the worst with a failure rate of about 50% in the first three years.

As far as Gateway, the E3400 was the last straw for us. We stopped buying gateway shortly after buying these machines. Gateway's other models took a similar nosedive in quality around the same time.

Posted by: toadlife   Posted on: 03/19/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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