major setback in development, or NEVER buy a Gateway

Today, I booted up my relatively new Gateway desktop machine, which I have been running gentoo linux on for a while, and was warned by the BIOS that the hard drive was corrupt.

This is the last straw for me. I bought this computer in June of 2002 when my old computer spectacularly died in a blaze of glory. I happened to be in the middle of a freelance job working on a website for someone at the time, and so flew downtown to the Gateway store in New York City, picked out the top of the line they had in the store, and took it back in a taxi. At first, it was great, but the problems began to mount.

First, after only a year, the internet stopped working. At this point, I contacted Gateway using my laptop, because I had been smart enough (I thought) to purchase the 3 year extended warranty. After an hour in their online live support (basically IMing), the guy's best idea was to "re-install windows." I pointed out that the restore disks didn't have MS Word on them, even though it came pre-installed. His suggestion? Buy another copy. At this point, I became fed up, and after copying needed docs to my laptop, decided to install gentoo linux. This worked great for about 7 months until suddenly, BOTH of the 2 hard drives I had cannibalized from the old computer failed. I figured this was due to happen, since they were older, but I was shocked when the original SATA drive also failed 3 months later, with an audible grinding noise followed by a blue screen of death. In addition, the built-in ethernet on the motherboard failed, so I bought another card.

Incidentally, the laptop failed 1 year after I bought it, about 10 days after the warranty expired. eMachines was the manufacturer, who was incidentally bought by Gateway. Very odd coincidence.

Last year, I purchased a brand new WD hard drive, and installed it in the Gateway, put gentoo on the computer exclusively, and have happily used it until today's corruption. At this point, I'm out of options. I can't afford the time to reconstruct my entire gentoo setup from scratch on ANOTHER new drive, and can't afford the money to buy a new computer. At this point, I'm stuck with my windows machine. I was running VMware with gentoo, but today, when I tried to start it, the gentoo.vmx file was deleted, with no trace.  I have no idea what happened to it, so now I have no linux whatsoever.

In any case, the point is, if you're considering buying from Gateway, don't. You're not going to get your money's worth even if you spend top dollar.