Interested in stories about service and tech support

Hi y'all. Thinking of purchasing a Gateway pc, one of their stores is
in our city. From reading three separate magazines, one a consumer
mag, two pc mags, it appears that Gateway quality is AT LEAST average.
But how about their customer service after the sale and tech support?
Be interested in hearing all stories both positive and negative
before I spend the big bucks. Thank you all very much.

Oh yeah, on a lesser important side note, is it possible to have
Gateway build me a pc with two INTERNAL hard drives, thanks again.

Acadia

Please reply in this forum, above email address is no longer valid.
Have a nice day AND a happy life.

 

bc,

Speaking from 10 years experience as a GW customer, their tech support
used to be outstanding. In recent years, it seems the knowledge of the
average tech has slipped. However, you can always ask for a supervisor.
All of my problems over the years have always been solved to my
satisfaction, although it's gotten much harder to get simple problems
resolved. Persistence does pay off, though.

As for GW quality, I've always been happy with it. All of my GW systems
(2 desktops and 2 laptops)...going back to 1994...are still running very well.
Now, that says a lot about quality.

I would not hesitate to buy another Gateway.

Scott

 

This is pretty relavent to your question. I purchased a GW 710XL Home
Office PC that came Fri 2/25. It comes with two 250GB hard drives
configured as a RAID 0 array. That is, it appears as one large 500GB
drive as data is striped across the two. I did not want that, I
wanted two seperate 250GB ATA drives. Furthermore, it came formatted
as FAT32 and I really wanted NTFS. I received email instructions on
how to change that but they were wrong and quite franky, sort of
silly. For example, they sent me a program to write 0s to the whole
drive before I reformatted them. How stupid.

Anyway, I also bought the Gateway Prioirty Access which guarantees 30
second answer time. OK, I got to try it. Sure enough a very nice and
calm, perfect english speaking, obviously educated guy answered on
about the second ring. This was about 2pm EST. He walked me through
it and and after the drive started to reformat (takes about an hour on
a 250GB drive, he gave me perfect step-by-step to finish).

Now I have it exactly the way I want. Using the GW Applications disk
that came with it, I then installed only the "extra" crap I want.

My new PC is now set up and most all my apps are re-installed and
apparently working quite well. BTW, when I ordered, the system had a
3.2Ghz P4 and GW upgraded it to the 3.4Ghz they are selling now.
Doesnt sound like much, but there is significant price increase for
the "newest" chip on the market.

Even with Norton Antivirus and Norton Internet Security, the boot time
is about 25 seconds, my old GW GP6-460 is over 4 minutes. Is this
nice or what! (XP Pro, 1GB RAM)

Bob

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Wow, very interesting story. Sounds like you received good tech support
AFTER the sale but the sale itself was all messed up!?!? Thanks for
sharing.

Acadia.

 

Being a GW buyer/user since they were created, I have rarely used tech support, and when I did, it was always helpful.
Three days ago I had a problem with one of my machines, and went to the GW site and found a little thing called
e-support. So I tried it, and you know what, the tech that came online helped me fix my problem within 10 minutes.
I don't know of any other manufacturer that has service this fast. Maybe a fluke, don't know, all I know is that my
problem was taken care of in a timely and professional manner.

Just my 2 cents worth.

HD

 

I have been a Gateway owner since 1994 -two computers, both still running.
I would say as a whole the tech support is pretty good although I don't use
it a lot. Occasionally you get a tech who is new or doesn't seem very
knowledgeable but for the most part they are pretty good. From my
viewpoint the reliability is outstanding. Both the Gateway computers I
owned had only minor problems, and like I said, both are still working. I
just bought a new computer and bought a Dell because I was told they were
faster because of the way they were configured. I am hoping that I get the
same reliability out of the Dell that I have gotten from Gateway.

Kay

 

"bought a Dell because I was told they were faster because of the way they
were configured."

and who feed you this line of pure BS?