Agile Tortoise
Greg Pierce’s blog
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Gateway pluses and minuses
The Gateway 600 laptop that is my current work machine is a piece of crap. It was a good deal when I got it, and has decent performance, but it’s clunky, noisy and poorly constructed. The plastics near the hinges for the screen developed cracks within months of me getting it, which I have just lived with because I didn’t want to send it in to them for a week or two to get it fixed. Now the hard drive failed — which isn’t really a reflection on Gateway, but it still sucks. It’s been dying for a couple of months, but it’s really crapped out now.
All that said, I just had one of the most pleasant phone tech support incidents I’ve ever experienced when I called about the problems. I was greeted after a very short hold time by a person who spoke good English, identified herself by name and “badge number” immediately. This person listened to my complaint and brief explanation of the problems and didn’t challenge my conclusions or make any stupid suggestions regarding things I should try. She then offered me options for how I would like to resolve the situation and get the machine repaired quickly. Then made sure I had her information to directly contact her if I had any questions or needed to check on the status of the machine while it was in for repairs.
Refreshing. Not enough to make me buy another Gateway, however…and now I have to live without my main dev machine at work for at least a week, probably more.
January 13th, 2004 at 1:54 pm
Argh. Got back the Gateway today. They didn’t replace the hard drive. How annoying, that’s the big problem. Drives don’t throw new bad sectors every couple of weeks unless they are dying. Oh well, guess I need to get back on the phone.
Update: Gateway is overnighting a new drive.