Gateway Nightmare (no, not a new model)

I bought a Gateway laptop via Futureshop (child company of Best Buy for us Canadians) a bit over a year ago (December 21st, 2005 to be precise). The model number is Gateway MX6629. The laptop is great, it does everything I want, minus the video card capability it promised (which is now giving me a lot of problems since Windows Vista's suggested requires more video memory).

When I purchased the unit, Futureshop had this unit marketed as 128MB of video memory, which is what I wanted. The box that the unit came with advertised Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900, which shows can preform at 128MB of video memory on both Gateway Website and Intel Website. Shortly after my purchase, however, I found out that this unit does not dynamically allocate up to 128MB. In fact, it only allocate up to 64MB. I contacted Gateway support on the day of purchase, and they confirmed to me that it will dynamically allocate up to 128MB.

But that is most certainly not the case. I checked the BIOS, the driver, and dxdiag; ALL of them indicates that the system can only get up to 64MB. So I contacted them again, and again, and again, and again. Eventually, some time in December 2005 or Early January 2006, I was told that Gateway Inc. will provide a BIOS patch to resolve this issue. Looking at the time now, and the over 200kb email (plain text) communication log from last year and almost two months, the issue is still unresolved.

A few interesting things to note:
Intel confirmed to me via an email that the driver is suppose to show:

Not the current:

Microsoft confirmed to me via this thread that DirectX cannot get more memory than what is shown in dxdiag (which shows 64MB).

One of the Gateway support provided me these links:
> ftp://download.intel.com/support/graphics/intel845g/dvmt.pdf
> http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/sb/cs-010488.htm
Which one isn't for my laptop's GMA 900, and the other is relevant only in the slightest way.

I provided them the correct link in my response:

Additionally, I've also provided them the correct settings they'd have to set to get it working per designed:

And guess what? I got a seemingly canned response telling me to uninstall and reinstall my motherboard driver, and them telling me that upgrading may cause problems to their configuration... Funny... I've upgraded on their already faulty configuration, and giving them the correct configuration I get such wonderful response...

That was December 2006, a full year after purchasing the unit and working with their support about this. Now that have dragged on again for over two more months, and now I'm just not willing to wait any more longer. I've filed a BBB complaint yesterday, and am wondering if there is any other channels I should raise this issue so the attention gets out to everyone or at the very least the correct people?

 

The BBB is basically the best contact out there for this type of problem, among others.

The only other thing you could do would be to start up a blog about it to raise more attention to the issue, but it doesn't sound like this is that big of a problem.

Why didn't you just return it after you got home and noticed the max memory was 64MB? just curious..

Good Luck

 

Well, I got it, and found a dead pixel on the first unit... I brought that one back and replaced it. Then I noticed the problem, but it wasn't as big of a problem then (there was no Windows Upgrade Adviser screaming in my face saying it needs 128MB of video card memory to run everything), so I decided that everything else of the unit works fine, I'll keep it.

 

Ahhh I see, well I wish you luck working out your issue Alfarin.