- Oct 9, 2002
- 28,298
- 1,235
- 136
I purchased a new Gateway laptop with Vista Home Premium for my sister to replace the failing laptop I gave her a few years ago. I wanted to get rid of some bloatware before sending it to her (McAfee, AOL, etc), but I still wanted her to use the Vista Welcome Center to get accustomed to some of the changes in Windows Vista. Gateway had customized it and it was covered with broken shortcuts to applications that I had not installed. I knew that this would be a bad impression as the first thing that my sister sees on her new laptop, so I reinstalled Windows Vista using the Operating System disc, which was the only disc included in the package.
After the install, I browsed through the hidden folders on the recovery partition and found that I could not install most of Gateway's useful OEM customizations or applications. There were NO useful downloads on the website and there are buggy driver/firmware problems that can't be resolved. It was possible to do a full restore from the recovery partition by pressing a certain key during bootup, but the boot sector was replaced when Windows was reinstalled. Gateway offers none of the useful applications as downloads on their site, nor do they offer a way to restore the boot sector. They are sending a full recovery disc, but that just means that my sister will have to wait even longer for me to send it. She needs the laptop for school.
Did anyone else buy a new Gateway laptop during the sales after Vista was released? I'd like to get a boot image to restore mine to the factory condition.
My model is a Gateway MT3705 notebook, though I'm sure Gateway desktops that came with any version of Windows Vista probably have identical boot sector data.
If anyone else has one, let me know and we'll find a way to copy the boot image.
Thanks!
After the install, I browsed through the hidden folders on the recovery partition and found that I could not install most of Gateway's useful OEM customizations or applications. There were NO useful downloads on the website and there are buggy driver/firmware problems that can't be resolved. It was possible to do a full restore from the recovery partition by pressing a certain key during bootup, but the boot sector was replaced when Windows was reinstalled. Gateway offers none of the useful applications as downloads on their site, nor do they offer a way to restore the boot sector. They are sending a full recovery disc, but that just means that my sister will have to wait even longer for me to send it. She needs the laptop for school.
Did anyone else buy a new Gateway laptop during the sales after Vista was released? I'd like to get a boot image to restore mine to the factory condition.
My model is a Gateway MT3705 notebook, though I'm sure Gateway desktops that came with any version of Windows Vista probably have identical boot sector data.
If anyone else has one, let me know and we'll find a way to copy the boot image.
Thanks!
Facebook
Twitter