stevesa@microsoft.UUCP (Steve SALISBURY) (11/09/90)
> I'm having very bad luck with Gateway 2000.
I don't doubt that some people will have a bad experience with Gateway 2000.
I think any retailer will make some mistakes, and somebody will suffer from
those mistakes.
However, I want to put in my two cents as a satisfied customer.
A few weeks after I got my 386/33, which has always worked fine, I ordered a
second hard disk. It was a half-height 3.5" drive in a cradle to make it fit
a 5.25" slot. They forgot to send me the small railings to make it sit
properly in the drive slot, and when I phoned they were courteous and promptly
shipped me a new cradle, thinking that this was what I meant. I phoned them
again and they sent me the right thing. All very prompt and courteous ands
most importantly, FREE.
After a few weeks I ran NORTON Utilities v5.0 CALIBRATE on the disk and found
some of the early sectors were flakey, at least according to Norton. I phoned
them and they shipped me a new hard disk with an RMA Number for the return of
the old disk. I don't mind paying the return shipping for the old disk when
they sent the replacement FEDERAL EXPRESS!
As far as another user who complained about CPU performance, a 20 MHz 386
with RAM caching shouldn't out-perform a 25 MHz without it, although you
wouldn't expect the results that user is getting. Very puzzling.
I compared some CPU benchmarks on my Gateway 386/33 versus a Compaq 386/33
and it was less than 2% slower than the Compaq. That's pretty darn good!
My 386/33 has a CPU RAM cache plus also has 8 MB. Maybe that also helps.
Steve Salisbury
Redmond, Washington, USA