Can Anyone Help Me With Gateway?? Updated 8/10..

[cohenfive]

thanks again for all the advice. as i mentioned, for now i'm covered as gateway did the right thing by me by replacing the pc completely.

my next pc purchase (to replace my son's old athlon 850mhz) will definitely be a build. are there any online help guides (other than asking on this site) on what to do?

karenmarie, looked at your 'main squeeze'...nice rig!!!

have a good weekend all!!

 

[CptObvious]

Suggestion for your next PC: I've built a few systems but the easiest one for me by far (not that any of them were that hard) was a mini-PC barebones system. Mine was made by Biostar but Shuttle is the most popular choice. Took me only ten minutes to put all the components in and fire it up.

 

[cohenfive]

ok, now i truly don't have any idea what is going on...check this out:

got the replacement pc from gateway yesterday. it came with a crappy video card (5200 analog only) so i swapped the video card out with the 9600 from the other machine (gw said that was ok even though i was sending the other machine back). set it up, powered it up and i'm in business. spent some time getting the peripherals and other stuff going, involved a few restarts--no problem. shut the machine down feeling pretty good about the situation. come back to it a couple hours later, boot it up and i have the exact same, totally garbled video i had on the old machine!!

so i thought, aha!! i know the problem, it must be the 9600 video card from the other pc (even though it's been tested at least 3 times). so i take my gf4 ti4200 out of storage and pop it in there thinking this should work, but no it doesn't--same garbled video. i also tried unhooking the bluetooth keyboard/mouse that i had and even moved the pc to another room in case there was some interference or power problem that i was not aware of...ok, i admit to desperation at this point!!

i took the new pc and the old pc into another room and tried both with both the 9600 as well as the gf4 video cards--nothing doing. so i think, what is it that these have in common--dvi on the card, dvi on the monitor (dvi connection only on the monitor i have). again i think, let's see if analog connection will work. so i put the 5200 back in the new pc (analog only) and got an old crt monitor out of my garage, booted everything up and low and behold it works!!!

so now i have a new pc that seems to work (but given the problems we'll see if it shows the same problem of booting a few times and then dying), but only running analog video with an analog monitor. that doesn't seem to be a great solution to me.

any ideas--i'm totally stumped--somehow the interaction of dvi card and monitor won't work, but now we're talking about 2 video cards and two pc's....same monitor though (although gw replaced the monitor already a while back in the process)....

thanks!

 

[dabuddha]

Perhaps your monitor is bad? DVI connection may have gone bad?

 

[cohenfive]

that's a possibility...i'll try to get another cable...thanks. might explain why at gw the pc works but at my home it doesn't. only thing is i have had the monitor replaced (with new cable) and same problem..worth a shot though..

 

[dabuddha]

You might also want to try a new monitor. You can purchase one from a store to test it out and return it afterwards if you don't want to keep it.

 

[cohenfive]

they've already replaced the monitor (i wonder whether that was a mistake).....i have another monitor (dell/samsung with dvi) that i can try. hope i can't mess it up..

 

[cohenfive]

i may just try buying new dvi cable as well as a dvi/vga adapter to see if i can get the flat panel to work with the pc at least in analog mode....what do you think?

 

[Doggiedog]

My sympathies.

I bought one of the first 1Ghz PCs from Gateway way back when and despite it being their top of the line PC, they treated me like crap when I had problems with it. First off, it did not work properly right out of the box and when I called for help, they quickly determined it was an OS problem and told me to call Microsoft. I was like WTF? The PC came like this and you are telling me to call MSFT? I ended up debugging the problem myself. Then I had an incompatibility with a SCSI card I had that Gateway knew about but since I did not buy the card from them, they told me I was SOL. There were also tons of other problems with the PC and eventually I gave up and rebuilt it from scratch using just the CPU, vid card and sound card.

I've never written so many nasty emails to a company in my life. I think I have them archived somewhere for laughs.

Anyway, Gateway truly sucks and I'll never buy from them again. (Dell too).

 

[So]

All the nitemare stories I have heard, of Gateway, and of Dell, when friends buy laptops I point them to HPAQ and IBM.

 

[Ryan]

My parents have a 1.2ghz Athlon Gateway computer that they leave on 24/7, and they haven't had a problem in 3 years of ownership. :thumbsup:

 

[V00DOO]

I recalled reading about a guy who has an ongoing issue with his Gateway PC for 2 years without getting resolution. No wonder Gateway is going down.

 

[IamElectro]

Originally posted by: rbloedow
My parents have a 1.2ghz Athlon Gateway computer that they leave on 24/7, and they haven't had a problem in 3 years of ownership. :thumbsup:

Your parents are one of the lucky 1 out of 20 that got a machine that works like its supposed to.

I worked at a call center for Gateway as a senior tech for a year and they didnt care if we fixed a machine or not. They basically wanted the "techs" off the calls ASAP. My favorite was when people who called in complainig about thier machine running slow, techs were supposed to reffer them to OP Sales for a ram upgrade and not research the problem. I kid you not supervisors told the techs not to try and fix a slow machine until they bought ram or were at least advised to.

 

[Ryan]

Originally posted by: IamElectro

Originally posted by: rbloedow
My parents have a 1.2ghz Athlon Gateway computer that they leave on 24/7, and they haven't had a problem in 3 years of ownership. :thumbsup:

Your parents are one of the lucky 1 out of 20 that got a machine that works like its supposed to.

I worked at a call center for Gateway as a senior tech for a year and they didnt care if we fixed a machine or not. They basically wanted the "techs" off the calls ASAP. My favorite was when people who called in complainig about thier machine running slow, techs were supposed to reffer them to OP Sales for a ram upgrade and not research the problem. I kid you not supervisors told the techs not to try and fix a slow machine until they bought ram or were at least advised to.

I too worked for gateway (although at one of their Gateway Country Stores).