Are Gateway desktops any good?
 

Hi folks
I am thinking of buying a Gateway desktop. It has excellent specs at a very good price. However, according to Consumer Reports, Gateway has the worst reliability record of all the major brands. And the service centre is in the Phillipines. I wonder if anyone has had bad luck with this brand.

Didn't they go bust and come back from the dead in the last few years?

Get a mate in the know to choose one that meets your requirements from eBay. :)

A few years ago a friend gave me a Gateway laptop as it was excess to his requirements and at the time I didn't have one. I threw it away after three weeks, apart from a Motorola cellphone it was the crappiest piece of electronics I've ever owned.

It might be unfair, but I would assume the desktops would be of equally poor quality.

I was thinking that Mike, but the OP is in Canada, suspect it's a different Gateway.

IIRC Gateway started in the US, then expanded to Europe and other international markets, from whence they were forced to beat an ignominious retreat in the early 2000s, following the .com bubble burst.

They were bought by Acer in 2007, and no longer sell direct to consumers. The Gateway line is now only available via resellers, although Acer has brought the Gateway back to international markets.

SD

Thanks for your input. I noticed a Dell desktop with better specs in the same price range which I think I'll order. I've had good luck with Dell in the past and their reliability is somewhat better than Gateway according to CR.

Yeah, but I bet their customer service still sucks and their pricing policies a bit weird and wonderful (starting with their extortionate P&P rates and working your way back to the config wizard ..... ).


Personally, I wouldn't touch a Dell with a barge pole. Even if you gave me one for free.

HP (NOT the cheap consumer-grade "Compaq" brand, like Cisco and Linksys etc. it's just not the same) is a much better bet.

I'd have to disagree. For years I have always built my own computers from scratch (or seriously upgraded) but obviously with laptops this is not possible. I have found Dell's to be solidly built and always excellent. I preferred the older generation of dell laptops to the current ones as they were not over-engineered.

Obviously you are looking at desktop computers and not laptops, Dell UK customer service has always been very good to me (but used to cost extra, 90 day warranty was standard from Dell until a few years ago). We use Dell computers at work, although they are covered in my companies bloatware, they run very well. As long as you know what your looking for, there are often decent Dell offers in the newspaper, you can get a decent spec'd computer at a good price. One earlier poster suggested getting a friend in the know to customize one to meet your requirements, this is also a good idea, but I doubt you will get the same level of customer care. The ebay seller has a higher likelihood of going out of business and if anything were to break, you would have to deal with the component manufacturer directly which will be difficult, costly and prone to error.

I see that the OP is in Canada.

Here in the USA I've bought a number of Dells from their "Small Business and Home Office" on-line subsection. They might not have been the absolute cheapest, but they have never failed. (Knock on wood.) Something that gives me some confidence is that this subsection of Dell includes Next-Business-Day-On-Site-Service for one year at no extra charge. Maybe that is also their policy in Canada.


As for Gateway - my memory says that Gateway bought eMachines to learn their tricks of building the absolutely cheapest CPs. Eventually ACER bought Gateway. Don't they still market all three brands?

Dismantled a few desktops over the years from what I have seen the only thing propriety to a particular maker is the tin case the bits come in and the brand label stuck on the front, they all use third party motherboards graphics memory hard disks AMD or Intel CPU ect,so it's just a matter of selecting one that used the best bits in said tin case.
:)

I think you might be over-simplifying things there Tony D !

Airbuses and Boeings are also a mash-up of innumerable third party products.

Third party components they may be, but money brings you better build quality and better components. The cheaper machines are a right pain to work with, whilst the more expensive ones are beautifully laid out, tool-less designs with higher quality components.

Admittedly you see this difference a lot better when you start looking at servers where it's much easier to spot the cheap rubbish from the well thought out stuff. But it's still there in the desktops too.

Tony, you have never come across HP / Compaq / Dell or IBM desktop kit...

Unique fit / bespoke mobos, power supplies & connectors, drive brackets, case wiring connectors etc. Even unique floppy drives in many Compaq models!

OK, I'm talking here about business rather than home ranges, but even home Dell PCs have (or had) non-standard PSUs, motherboards and mounting kits to my certain knowledge.

SD

I've only ever come across one or two Dell models which used standard motherboards in the 20 years i've been dealing with them (and that was in 1995 with a couple of Dimensions I bought as they topped a group test and I needed the fastest PC money could buy at the time).

Ever since, i've not come across one Dell that has a standard mobo.

Oh... and there's Apple kit too.

There's no way Tony can argue against Apple kit being highly bespoke !

As a home user, I would not touch Dell with a bargepole.

Where I used to work, with lots of techies talking to Dell techies, we all had Dells and they worked fine.

I bought one for myself. It went wrong. It went wrong after about 72 hours. Hours on the phone to somewhere in the sub-continent, and hours of hearing the same script. They didn't ever bother to read the e-mails about the problem on file.

Probably the worst customer service ever. Worse than BT and British gas pre-privatisation.

Eventually persuaded them that new box was needed. They sent new one - which had less USB connections, and which made noises like a tractor.

Eventually got a friend to speak to Dell UK's MD, who very very reluctantly (after threats of Court case with him personally named) refunded my money.

Never, ever again.

Yer stripped out a HP Pavilion desktop belonging to Nephew a while back and made it into a proper puter,for Bro Draper, fitting a new PSU to replace the mini one in the case was fun a bit of metal bashing was required,but the different MB went in ok,the only thing I could not manage was the usb connectors to the front of the case,the existing wirng termination did not fit the USB socket on the new MB.
:)

Now be fair, if hammers are involved then almost anything can be made "un-bespoke"! :)

SD