What if People Weren't First: A Second Look at Buying a Gateway
Dec 02 '00
In 1998 our family became the happy owners of a Gateway PC. Our model was reasonably priced, service from Gateway on the order and a subsequent problem (mother board replacement) was excellent, and the machine is still fun to use.
Fast forward to Christmas season 2000. We are tired of my father-in-law's efforts to continue to nurse along his elderly but upgraded 486. My mother-in-law has become an avid user and is relegated to doing all her e-mailing from the notebook computer in their house. My husband, Bob, and his sisters band together to make that important decision to pull the plug on Dad's oldie-and-used-to-be-goodie and bring him up to speed.
We seek out a machine we can buy together for as close to $1000 (or less) as we can. We agree that service and reputation of the seller are important to us. Bob and I are entrusted with the responsibility of shopping for this joint present. Having been such satisfied Gateway customers, Gateway's site is our first stop. To our delight, we are able to put together what we think is an awesome package that'll knock Dad's socks off. We consult with the sisters and order our selection.
Then the e-mail from Gateway confirming our order arrives. In addition to confirming the order and giving us our order number, there is a friendly-sounding but lengthy warning about the model we've ordered having a "legacy free" case. It indicated that if you intended to hook up any non-USB fitted peripherals, you needed to reply to the e-mail right away.
Bob wrote back immediately in response, indicating that his Dad does indeed have an HP722C deskjet printer and some type of scanner to hook up. After three days, we'd heard nothing back from Gateway. We looked a little further on our own into the Gateway definition of "legacy free." It turned out to mean that the case for this PC would contain only USB ports!
Now I know that any real geek would have known that USB is becoming the new standard for peripheral connections and other things. But Gateway markets itself as the place where the rest of us can buy computers. We waited for their reply to our e-mail, assuming that they would propose a workable solution to our situation, especially since they had solicited the information from us.
We were not contacted. So after three days, Bob started calling Gateway. It was a very frustrating experience, with many busy signals, long waits on hold and some disconnects. Bob couldn't reach our sales rep or her supervisor during this period, nor did we hear from them subsequently, either.
And to make matters worse, when he finally reached a live person, Bob found out that Gateway had no intentions to help us make it possible for his father to use his current peripherals with the flex case. One Gateway rep suggested that all we needed to do was buy two adapters for the USB ports that would allow the connection of parallel devices. The price of the adapters he said were available were high enough that it made us rethink the order; maybe for that much money we could move to a different model where the "legacy free" case wouldn't be an issue.
We were very angry about the marketing pap Gateway was using. Their decision to offer a case that did not accommodate parallel and serial devices may be a fine decision from a business standpoint, and may be defensible technologically as well. What bothers me is their invention of a term that is not very well explained that ultimately implies that anyone attempting to connect their existing parallel and serial devices to a new computer is simply passe. Don't tell me the case is "legacy free;" tell me the truth, which is that it includes only USB ports.
Two more discussions with Gateway reps led to an understanding that the use of adapters to connect a non-USB device to a USB port was not as easy as the first rep had indicated. The connections might be unreliable, which was a risk we were not willing to take on a computer that we intended to be a problem-free gift. After thinking about these factors and looking at other Gateway models, we decided on a different computer, this time from Dell. Interestingly, despite the marketing pap about the supposed advantages of the "legacy free" case, more expensive Gateway models still have at least one non-USB port.
I am disappointed that I can no longer recommend Gateway without hesitation and hope that the company will return to the practices that made it successful: affordable computers, good support and straight talk for non-geeks.
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Epinions.com ID:
kigle
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Member: Cathy Hawn
Location: Rumson, NJ
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 0 members
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