Listen to a recent Gateway customer: I purchased a $2000 1Ghz Desktop system and have had nothing but problems and complaints. I purchased a desktop from GAteway about 6 years ago and was satisfied with the product and support then. Now apparently something has changed. I went with GAteway because I always considered them to be the best. But they have sold me a $2000 lemon. - My order was late by about 6 days, and only came then because I harrassed them on the phone as much as I could. - The system crashes about every third bootup or shutdown. - I was sold a defective hard drive -- it had "physical damage" according to the Scandisk utility. - An onsite tech installed a new hard drive, but reinstalled windowsMe incorrectly and screwed up the device drivers. - After spending an hour on the phone, the tech's brilliant advice was (as usual) reinstall Windows. I had to spend another 2 hours resintalling it and configuring it. - Now the system boots up to a LAN management utility that came with the network card. Since I am not connected to a LAN, it just sits there until I reboot about 2 or 3 times. I have checked the BIOS, and it tells me a LAN bootup is fourth on the priority list AFTER booting from the CDROM, Floppy drive, and the hard drive. - My printer will not print anymore. I have checked the printers folder, the queue, control panel, etc. etc. etc. No apparent reason why it won't print ,it just won't. - In sum, I have wasted about 40 hours of my christmas vacation toiling over this $2000 lemon, and I am infuriated that I will get charged $139 in shipping fees if I send this piece of crap back. Someone please start a website. -MG

Well Matt, what's stopping you??

Imy myself own a $1,500 Gateway I bought right before the switch to Win Me it worked great until I recived my ME upgrade, I called they had write zeros to the drive format creant main Dos Parition and reinstall windows 98. I kept windows 98 and my problems are no more.

Hey Matt I have a SOLO 5300cl/P-3/128ram 16meg_savage/10ghd/Me No Major Problems (except I wish it wouldn't run so hot) Any Laptop owner's can you fry egg's on your machine ?

I know the feeling. I have got had when buying a pc, but it was used so I did not pay so much for it but I was still frustrated the store owner knew it had problems & sold it to me anyway. I returned it & they said they could not find anything wrong with it. (I could not get my money back that was there policy) I then took it to another computer shop & they said it was the motherboard. Now it is just sitting in my closet collecting dust until I get a motherboard for it. Oh well, thats life. It was a gateway by the way.

Listen to this one. Myself and 2 other friends of mine all bought Gateways. Two 800mhz's and one 1ghz. Not only did the 900's go to the price I paid two weeks before, but we all have been having problems with the damn things. My friend and me (800's) have to log on twice to get our dial-up networking to work right, his video card burned out on him after only 2 months of use, we both had to overlay Windows more than once, and the tech support blows super chunks. I tell ya, lesson learned. We're never buying from Gateway ever again. Go Alienware!

This is a copy of an e-mail from my brother. Original purchase was 10-3-99 and replacement on 10-27-99. I advised him to talk to “CBS News We Are On Your Side”. I was also told at the Gateway store that you can get their PC’s loaded with Win98 and he is going to see if they will take Win Me back. Jerry, Thanks for visiting a Gateway store and trying to help me with my computer. And thanks for the phone call last night. As I had mentioned before, I do not or did not know much about computers. With 90 days of trouble and talking to Techs for many hours, I am beginning to learn a little. They keep telling me the same thing they tried to tell you, that "some programs do not work with ME". Everytime I talk with a tech, if they can not fix the problem, they start blaming it on some software I put on the computer. If that does not work they start blaming it on hardware. I decided to buy a microphone for the computer. I went to the Gateway store to get it, they do not sell microphones. The manager told me to go next door to the office supply store and buy any computer microphone they have, they all will work. Tuesday when talking to a tech about a problem, they are trying to blame it on the microphone, even though it has worked fine since we put it on the computer. I got the computer back from the Gateway store Tech shop on 12/29. Here are some of the problems just since the 29th.: On the same day that I got it back and had only set up the internet and e-mail, no other programs had been installed. I opened start/control panel/users and got this Error: "EXPLORER HAS CAUSED AN ERROR IN MSACM32.DLL. EXPLORER WILL NOW CLOSE" I could not close the window for the error, or the window for the control panel. The computer was froze, the power button on front of processor would not turn off computer. I needed to reach down and un-plug the power cord. Later in the same day after computer had been shut down for a couple hours, I was using it and noticed that the Task Bar did not have any icons in it. The usual icons are the internet explorer, the outlook express, Norton anti virus, the volume control icon. The entire task bar was empty. The start button, which was only thing on the task bar, did not work. That same evening in using computer it was working fine. However, I wanted to look at the "C" drive so I right clicked the start button and clicked on explore, which is the way to the hard drive. The computer again froze. This time the power button on the computer did shut it down and was able to re-start okay. Things worked fine until 3pm the next day, 12/30. Window was open, computer was working fine. Clicked the start button and entire computer froze again. You could see that the start button was froze as there was a light dotted line around the icon. Needed to power down and re start computer. No other problems that day. On the morning of 12/31. Computer had been off all night. Pressed power button to start computer, only thing that came up was a blank screen with this message: "WINDOWS PROTECTION ERROR. YOU NEED TO RESTART YOUR COMPUTER. SYSTEM HALTED." The monitor, keyboard, mouse, and power button on computer were all dead. Again only way to restart was to unplug the power cord at wall socket. At 11am on the same day 12/31 when I shut down the computer the error came up again in the process of shutting down. After unplugging the computer, I restarted to see what would happen. It started okay and opened windows, however I needed to go through "ACTIVE DESKTOP RECOVERY" to get the desktop restored. The problems sure seem to relate to "START" and "SHUTDOWN". At this point I called Tech Support. Tech had me go to "msconfig" and remove all the start up items. He then said, "Use the computer for a few hours and see if the error comes back". "Call us back if error comes up, or after a few hours if it does not happen again". There were no problems, at 4:45pm I called back and had them help me reset some of the start up items on msconfig. No more problems rest of day. Next day 1/1/01. Computer in use all day with no problems. At 3:30pm, shut down computer and got the same error as before: "WINDOWS PROTECTION ERROR. YOU NEED TO RESTART YOUR COMPUTER. SYSTEM HALTED." I unplugged the power cord, restarted and did not call a Tech. At 8pm that evening, again we shut down the computer and got the same error. Again needed to unplug power. Next day 1/2/01. This is when I decided to take a look at the pre-installed (from Gateway) program called MOVIE MAKER. When I clicked on the icon got this error window: "YOUR PROGRAM IS MAKING AN INVALID DYNAMIC LINK CALL TO A .DLL FILE". There was a "close" button on the error window. Nothing else on the desktop worked except the "close" button. When I clicked the close button the window closed and returned to the desktop window. Everything worked fine on the desktop. This was late in the day so I did not call a Tech. 1/3/01. After again trying to open "movie maker" got the same error message. Checked a few other pre-installed programs and they all worked fine. Only "movie maker" seemed to have a problem. I then called Tech support. The tech worked with me for over an hour trying different things to get movie maker to work. No matter what we did it came up with the same error. The tech finally gave up and said I had "two options". 1) "Uninstall all software and hardware and see if movie maker will work" 2) "Using the restore discs, totally restore the hard drive and windows ME". I have restored the hard drive 4 times on this second computer Gateway sent me in October. It also was restored at the Gateway Tech shop only 4 days prior on 12/29. The computer seems to work fine in other areas except "movie maker" at this time. I was only trying to investigate movie maker and did not need to use the program, so I did not do either of the Tech's 2 options. Movie maker at this time still does not work. Today is 1/5/01 and we have had no problems and no errors for over 36 hours.