Gateway Laptop Notebook Computer Complaint

I understand computers. I like computers. I fear no box full of chips. Until now.

If you are contemplating the purchase of a Gateway laptop or notebook computer, please reconsider. I bought a Gateway 6020ZX laptop and left it with my most competent computer support people to erase the crap promotional software from its brain. They proposed a whole re-format and re-install of a better operating system. Cool.

I got the call to bring by the Recover CDs to install drivers. Turns out, they are not included, they are sent ON THE HARD DRIVE! Apparently you need to make the recovery CDs on startup. The brainstems at Gateway installed the recovery CDs on a hard-drive partition!

The computer people here are good and I imagine them clicking “no” on all the pop-up windows for AOL, dick enlargement and phony prescriptions. They went right to the usual and customary job of formatting the drive.

Gateway does not post the drivers on the web. The “Customer Service” people offered to sell me a disk of drivers that would not be to me for 3-5 days. Are they kidding me? A recovery disk is something you put away somewhere safe. The web is the best source of drivers. Does it defeat the purpose to have a laptop that requires a set of 5 CDs along with it? What happens if you need to do a recovery in Japan?

Customer support via phone is useless. They are polite, but the tow the company line with no deviation from policy. IF you like autoresponders you'll LOVE Gateway's email reply system! No help at all. They gave me every BS answer that would work fine if I had the damn drivers!

I resolved the problem by going to a local Best Buy and making a set off of their machine when they were really busy. Now someone else gets screwed, but my computer works.

Screw Gateway. I buy 5-10 computers a year and I will NEVER consider that company again, and you shouldn't either. They could have FedEx'd me, or emailed me the drivers and I would have been thrilled, but they had to fight me.

Don’t buy their products and get back to me if you have questions.