Foreclosure Blog

My Experience With Gateway Laptops – Stay Far, Far Away!

If you are facing foreclosure or other financial problems, one thing you don’t need is more expensive consumer products that are unstable and break easily. Many people in foreclosure think about opening their own businesses and using a laptop for work and pleasure, while others just want a computer for browsing the internet and keeping in touch with their friends and family via social networking and email. If any of this describes you, then stay far, far away from Gateway laptops.

In the past four years, I have personally gone through 4 hard drives on 2 different Gateway laptops. On each laptop, the hard drive that initially came with the machine completely died within the first year of owning the computer. With the one year warranty, the company sent me a brand new hard drive, but this still does not make up for the fact that, on two different laptops, both of the original hard drives failed completely.

The Gateway MT-6707 -- less wireless cability than the original Stonehenge!

The first laptop, a Gateway MT6707, is now little more than a glorified iPod, although even my iPod has been more stable over the years that I’ve owned it. The MT6707, even after having a new hard drive, fails to hold a wireless internet connection, requiring repeated restarts in order to get it connected to the network run by my Linksys router. So instead of dealing with the continue frustration, I have the laptop wired directly into the router with an Ethernet cable, and then connected to speakers.

The second laptop is an expensive MS2252, supposedly a gaming platform in Gateway’s FX series of high performance laptops. While it looks impressive and is reasonably fast, the hard drive failed again within a year. Gateway sent me restore discs for $25 so I could reset the system from scratch.

If you love black screens and non-working laptops, get yourself a Gateway MS-2252 today!

But then the hard drive failed again! This time, it was entirely gone and it was after the warranty had expired. So I did the only thing reasonable: I went to Best Buy and got 2 new hard drives, one for operation and one for backup. With Gateway computers, you better have a hard drive backup and not store ANYTHING important on your main drive, because it will fail.

The latest development, which happened about a week ago is that the wireless internet stopped working. Just completely stopped working. There is a switch on the front of the laptop that supposedly turns the wireless internet on and off, but it does nothing anymore. I even ordered a brand new wireless card — the same one that is in the laptop to begin with — and it did nothing. Updating drives does nothing. So I have a $1,200 laptop that has had repeated hard drive failures and now can not even connect to the internet unless it is plugged into the router. Some high performance machine.

And it’s not like I ever put the laptop to much use. Sure, I work on it every day. But does Gateway consider writing a few articles and submitting them to a few sites or playing Youtube videos or Flash videos as too much for their FX-series laptops to handle?

Another thing: the laptop doesn’t even leave my house. It’s been out of my house maybe 3 times in the past 2 years or so, always in a case. It migrates the 30 feet between my living room, bedroom, and kitchen once a day depending on where I’m working, but I don’t drag it along the ground by its electrical cord.

So now I have two Gateway laptops that I spent over $2,000 on just for the systems, plus another few hundred dollars in new hard drives and a wireless card, and neither can work reliably on the internet without being plugged into a router. One works intermittently, and the other doesn’t work at all. Every other computer I’ve tried on my wireless network works fine — my neighbor’s Toshiba connects easily, my Asus netbook works flawlessly. But these two Gateways  — one a middle-of-the-road machine and the other a high-end gaming platform — completely fail.

If I wanted a computer I had to have plugged into the wall all the time, I would have bought a desktop. If you want a laptop, you don’t want a Gateway. They’re nothing but frustration and failure.

[On the plus side, every time I've had to call Gateway for a failed hard drive, their customer support has been helpful. But it doesn't help when their computers break before and after the warranty expires.]