by Marc Zimmerman

Created on: February 26, 2010

As I sit and write this article on a Gateway I purchased in June of 2008, a lot of memories come to mind, and not all of them are good, at all.  I purchased a Gateway FX541X gaming desktop for $2,000 in the spring of 2008, and found myself actually working on the computer over a month after I ordered it.  At first it seemed like a great deal but now that I look at it, I could get a gaming rig that's statistically 4x better than my current rig, and for less than $1600, such as a Dell Studio XPS 9000.  Of course, in the long run, my computer still gets the job done, thoguh it could be better. 

I'll start off with the bad stuff, and that brings customer service to mind.  The overall service given to me through Gateway online support, and the technician they sent to my house, were poor.  First of all, they shipped me a computer with a broken VGA cable to the monitor, and I had no clue that was the problem, and neither did the technician they sent to my house, who barely spoke English and wore no uniform.  Being that the VGA adapter to the monitor was busted, nothing was coming up on the screen, and it gave the same appearance as if the desktop itself was broken.  So the customer support at Gateway "assumed" it was a problem with the graphics card, so they sent me another 8800GT to my house, and it came over a week later.  Well the instructions on it said that if the original was not returned they would bill me $250.  So you're telling me that if I don't return the first graphics card you're going to charge me for it, as if you don't want me to keep them?  Well to my dismay, the graphics card was actually find, and neither the replacement nor the original showed any signs of life within the desktop.  The computer itself booted up fine and all the fans and electronics were going, including those on the display adapter (graphics card) itself.  So I had a small hunch but wasn't sure that it was the monitor, and being that I was only 15 years old at the time, and no computer expert, I left it up to the "experts" at Gateway customer support to tell me what to do.  I tried replacing the memory, and I even had to eventually ship my desktop tower back to Gateway (which I had to pay for!) and then wait another 2 weeks for a new one to arrive.  So the new tower finally came, and NOTHING.  Still the same problem, so my dad decided to just take us to Radioshack and we bought another VGA cable. 

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