I’ve been silently harboring a great disappointment in Gateway for the last 18 months, so although this has vectored into a technical discussion, I’m going to cut loose anyway.
I bought a top of the line Gateway laptop in August 1998, to the tune of about $3000. The computer that was shipped to me was fine, except that the floppy drive didn’t eject disks cleanly. I called tech support and they dispatched a new modular floppy drive.
The new floppy drive that arrived worked fine for about a month, and then the eject button siezed on it, and I had to resort to using paperclips to eject disks. Replacement floppy drive no. 2 sent.
That drive worked fine for a couple of months, I guess, since I don’t use floppies very often. Then it stopped working entirely, for reasons that are not clear to me. Called Gateway, received floppy drive no. 3.
About a week before the first anniversary of my purchase (and the expiration of the warranty), the hard drive utterly fails. No warning, no data loss beforehand. Just one morning, the computer tries to boot up and can’t even find that a hard drive exists. I report it to Gateway tech by e-mail, and receive no response. I wait another few days and report it again by phone. They tell me on the phone that my warranty has expired and they can’t send a new hard drive. After some extended runaround, I manage to get them to locate my original, timely report of the problem and they send a new hard drive. (I, of course, must reinstall all my software and cope with the lost files on the original drive.)
Now, about 18 months from when I bought it, my floppy drive has gone kaput again-- it won’t read or write to any disks and insists they are all unformatted. Since I’m now out of warranty, I’ve given up on the idea of getting it fixed. I can e-mail files up to 1.44 mb without much problem, and if I absolutely need to make floppies for something, I’ll go buy an external drive.
I will admit that laptops pose durability problems. The smaller the computer, the tighter the tolerances on moving parts, and the greater likelihood that something can go wrong. But it is absurd that I can experience mechanical problems in four separate floppy drives (which don’t get much use to begin with) over an 18 month period. Add to that the hard drive failure and a cosmetic defect (poor design put plastic hinges on an access panel on the part of the computer that rests on the desk, guaranteeing that they’ll break off eventually. Nearly every demonstration laptop in a Gateway store has a broken-off hard drive access panel.) and you’ve demonstrated a surprising absence of quality control in my eyes. I would be more willing to accept defects if I had purchased a budget computer, but Gateway is a prominent retailer, and I expect that their top of the line model will work reliably.
I have no real complaints about Gateway customer service; but for the somewhat annoying episode with the hard drive, they have been more than willing to quickly send replacement parts. But I am so frustrated by the repeated failure of their merchandise that I have resolved never to buy a Gateway computer again.
