Gateway- Support?

Well, my laptop conundrum's been solved- I'm now trying my best to pick up a Gateway P-8705u FX Edition, since it's obviously the best in its price range, and it looks pretty badass to boot. Now here's the catch: Support and reliability.

If you're a Gateway owner, could you please tell me how responsive their support is, how good they are with stocking parts, how reliable the computers are, and whether you can upgrade their notebooks? Acer have been a huge disappointment as far as support goes, and I wouldn't like to repeat the process. As always, thanks.

 

I will move this into the Gateway section for better responses.

 

Gateways support is crap, and Acer has bought them. So, it isnt very good.

My Aunt has a Gateway Desktop. With in the first couple months, the CD-ROM broke. They said that it fried, and shipped a box to her. It took almost 2 weeks to get here, which is kinda long, seeing that most companies overnight it. Although, she never sent it back, lol. So i dont have a whole story, but I would not recommend Gateway support.

 

I've heard it was terrible.

I got the best buy black tie thing with mine, so I just do everything through them (Already used it, and it was awesome)

 

Dammit! Back to the drawing board, then...

 

wait a sec. From what I've seen over the internet, it's mainly a mixed bag. Some say that it's absolute crap, some say that there've been no hiccups recently. I'm more interested in their warranty policy. The conditions under which the warranty can't be used seem to be a bit... large in number.

Anyone had any bad warranty experiences here? Oh, and if they ARE complete crap, could you please point me out to something which costs as much as (or less) than the P-7805? (about $1300) I can't go over that, under any circumstances. Please post any new ideas for laptops (they have to be laptops, I can't fit another desktop into my house) on my other thread. Thanks

 

THIS is very close to it.

THIS one as well, although the resolution is probably lower. And the warranty is through Best Buy, which is pretty crappy as well.

 

Ok, I know that gateway does not have the greatest reputation in the world. But, Acer was pretty stable back in the day, and from what I have read on this and other forums, things are a changin. Gateway's support is on par with Dell/Hp you stand about a 50% chance of getting it fixed right the first time. From what other 7811/7805 users have stated the Black Tie with ADH is well worth the expense. They will cover the laptop from top to bottom for 3 years for 300ish, which to me with kids is well worth the expense. So, for around 1400ish with tax and adh you can get a 7805u, which is one hell of a laptop for the price, would beat out the hp dv9 series with half it's ram tied behind its back

-Alitronic

 

Thanks ali. For anyone else looking at this thread, Gateway is an awesome choice if you can get a Black Tie off Best Buy or something like that. Problem is, I can't. Ah well. I'm going with ASUS now. My budget's gone up, so I'm looking for a G-series now.

 

MPC Gateway is out of business and no support is likely. I spent all day just trying to find Hinge for M255-E. Nothing anywhere?

 

Gateway support is crap. They made one of my coworkers cry, so now I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with her laptop. They actually called her an, "ignorant b**h", on the phone, kept interrupting her, and told her she "obviously knew very little about computers" (BTW, she's a Software Engineer). She got hung up on at least 3 times today.

Needless to say, she wasn't happy and has since given up on them.

 

Not to make fun of your friend, but most software engineers no next to nil about os, and hardware, they skipped those classes

 

While that's true, and I'll admit she's not as up-to-speed as some... she does have a basic grasp.

All she wanted was to send it in and have them fix it. The problem stemmed from the fact they claimed the unit was registered 12/10/07, when she bought it 1/25/08. Not to mention the manufacture date on the battery is 12/21/07, so I don't see how it got -registered- first.

 

I agree Gateway, Dell and other support are horrible to deal with when your tech savy, I would rather eat a box of ticks that deal with a nob telephone rangler that always ends up with the same solution, reformat.

 

I've contacted the Gateway support twice, and both experiences were positive. My issues were minor in both cases (driver installation and battery calibration), so that may be the reason. In both cases, I used chatting rather than calling and waiting time was rather short and I liked the fact that they could throw me some web addresses for more information (felt more efficient than letting them read the content or spell out the long addresses for me).

Gateway is not known for its customer support, but I'm not sure if it's far worse than its competitors. PC Magazine's Annual Reader Satisfaction Survey is not the most scientific study but the most accessible one. In the 2008 survey, Gateway ranked the 8th but its score compared to HP's or Dell's is rather small (the difference is less than .5 point in the 10-point scale).

 

I've gotten acceptable support from them so far, too.

Don't know what the future will bring, though.