liber@darth.PGH.PA.US (Eric Liber) (07/19/89)
Undoubtedly you are all getting tired of me and my Gateway so this is my
last word. If Milan or anyone else wants to bad mouth them so be it.
Someone asked for specifics.. ok here is my exact setup:
GATEWAY 2000 386 20mhz (this was purchased about October of 1988
and so i suspect has the "old" mother board..
in any case i think it's a GENE .. whatever
that is?)
Memory : 2mb 32 bit board using some strange 60ns! ram
1mb of OLD original AT expansion memory (extended really)
(these are the borads with the stacked 128k rams!)
1.5 meg of AST rampage + memory configured as extended memory
I/O : 4 serial ports / 2 parallel / game port
2 of the serial, 1 of the parallel and the game port came
with the machine on a clone card. the other parallel is on the
ast card and i picked up a cheap ($19) AT rated dual serial card
at the DAYTON hamfest.
DISK : WD1002-WA? dual Hard/Floppy controller. This is not a 1:1 controller
it works best in this machine at 2:1 as verified by spinrite.
: Micropolis 1325 85mb (unformatted) HD (formats to about 70mb)
I put this in myself since I had it on the shelf. I bought
the computer without HD.
: 1 5.25 - 1.2meg floppy
: 1 3.5 - 1.44meg floppy - both supplied by gateway
Video : Paradise VGA + 16 card
: NEC Multisync II - I supplied these myself since when i bought
this machine Gateway was only supplying EGA.
BIOS : Phoneix 386 V3.03 ?? (i am not sure about the .03)
The machine ran right out of the box. Except for Windows 386. I discovered
that the AWARD bios that it was shipped with did not disable interrupts
correctly when reading from the Floppy drives. Thus the machine would hang
if you tried to log a floppy from the windows command window. I called
gateway on this and one of their techs said yes that was a problem and I
probably needed a phoneix bios .. which normally was $75 additional. BUT
since i needed to run windows 386 they would trade even. They sent the
bios NEXT DAY AIR! and the rest is history as they say. I have yet to find
a hardware card or a software product that will not run. And i have some
cards from the dawn of time. The only software problems i have had are with
ancient games that have some screwy copy protection...nothing new here.
I regularly run :
DOS3.3
WINDOWS 368 v 2.03
Autocad R9
All of the TURBO products TP5.0,TC2.0,Tasm,Tdebug (in 386 mode)
QB4.5 (quick basic) .. for which i have almost completed a custom windowing
system.
The machine runs fast (much faster than the IBM PS2 model 80 I use at work)
One more thing . To be fair the WD controller did fail after about 1 month
of usage. It would no longer recognize the floppy disks. A call to gateway,
they call me back .. and a new controller arrives by .. NEXT DAY AIR! and
they pay the shipping for the return merchandise!
I am a satisfied customer of GATEWAY.. enough said.