Well informing people is our job. We are the computer literate and our job is to keep unknowing people from making mistakes like buying something crappy for more money often times. Like I used to tell all my friends not to buy a Gateway long ago. Sure enough they ignored my advise but it isn't their fault that their computer is slow and crappy, it's just fate even though they were told they can never take the blame.
To be fair, assuming you got a P3 Gateway back in the day, it wasn't SLOW so much as it was bloated with their shitware.
Not that but it had proprietary hardware and you needed to use Gateway approved overpriced hardware. I know this because she went to a computer store to fix her computer. They told her "get this" she had to buy a new hard drive because a virus killed her hard drive. I then told her I would put a hard drive into her computer. I did it and the computer kept crashing. The hard drive was fine, BUT Gateway's driver for the motherboard couldn't handle a Maxtor drive for some fucked up reason. She had to send it to massachusetts to have the drive replaced paying labor hardware and shipping costs both ways. That was one conniving company bleeding the customers stupid enough to buy on of all the spare cash they could trick them into paying. Hell Gateway if I remember right ended up becoming emachines or they bought emachines and let the Gateway part go under since they had such a bad name even non hardcore users would tell relatives and friends the things were crap and not cheaply upgradable or fixed. Yeah Gateway was the bottom of the barrel for premade computers along with emachine and Acer. Hell I told her I'd build her one to last for a long time, I would use gigabyte for a motherboard because it was a top of the line back then, a decent size processor, a large hard drive. Hell Gateway even had their own version of windows ME on her computer which was like a virus itself and windows xp would not run right with Gateway cheap ass proprietary hardware since it was so cheap only Gateway used it and it wasn't usable except with ME which is one of the worst OS's ever made.
Funny you mentioned that hard drive issue. The "Geek Squad" that passes for IT in my company had to swap out a HDD for an SSD in my bosses computer. The computer wouldn't take it. Wouldn't even recognize it. But when you popped it into another Tower, poof, perfect. I'm not sure if it's related to her computer being one of those "montior all in one" gimmicks like an Imac. All I know is watching that idiot fumble around in the BIOS trying to find it was funny as hell.
(post is archived)