Gateway
Charges boucou buck for tech support

I bought a Gateway PC about three years ago through a finance company called Intellipurchse because of my bad credit. I was sold one thing and sent another.

Insted of a Pentium, I got a Celeron.instead of a kick-bitt surfing and game console, I got a machine that was average at best. Performance of the unit has always been slow, but I chalked it up to the unit being constucted with low-end parts.

One of the major gripes with this thing is that it came with windows me. A.K.A. The bastard child of microsoft. Most of the problems of freezing up, crashing and suchlike went away when i was finally able to get ahold of windows 2000. Fixed by myself btw, no help from gate way tech support.

The thing gave me so much trouble at first i tried to send it back, and when that didn't work, I refused to pay for it for about 18 months. I finally gave up and paid it off.

So, 18 more months or so pass with me dealing with constant aggravations. Before I recently got cable internet it would take up to 10 minutes to load a webpage. As for games, shya right. The video card is not compatible with directx software, which is used by many pc game makers. Directx had some patches, but none worked. As a result, any game that is even remotely cool will freeze, skip, crash, and not display right.

But this is the kicker-did you know that TECH SUPPORT is a WARRANTY issue? I'm serious. The printer that came with the unit decided that it did not wish to accept new ink cartridges.

So i got a new one, figuring it was my fault cause the cat knocked it off the desk one day. I hook up the new printer and under no circumstances will the computer communicate with it.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that 3 out 6 USB ports have never worked.

Any ways, I call Gateway tech support and am told by some foreign guy i barely understand that since my warranty expired 2 years ago that I am no longer eligible to recieve free tech support. If I want to help to get ny USB ports and new printer to work right, I have to accept charges of $2.95 PER MINUTE on my phone bill (if I had a credit card, the charge would only have been $1.95 a minute).

I have worked tech support before, so i know that this issue would have taken 15 minutes to 2 or 3 hours to resolve.in other words, it would have cost me a fortune. I also was given a free "automated" help line. What this thing did was waste 20 minutes of my life only to end up saying that ny problem had to be solved by a live tech support agent and that I was being transfered. At which point the system hung up on me.

Please, all who read this: AVOID GATEWAY COMPUTERS AT ALL COSTS!!

Company: Gateway
Country: USA
State: Nationwide
Site: www.gateway.com

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