That should be their tagline, at least when it comes to their customer
service.
I purchased two top of the line PC's in 1997 from Gateway, one for me and
one for my Son, they were our first PC's so you can imagine the volume of
calls I made to Gateway for help. They were EXCEPTIONAL ! Using my computer
became a large piece of entertainment in my life, and streamlined
communication like I had never experienced before. My experience with
Gateways customer service then was quite impressive, so when it came time
for me to buy a system for my new business I naturally leaned in the
direction of buying another Gateway in spite of the praises friends gave to
me concerning Dell,,,dude.
I decided to purchase my new business system in person at the Gateway Store
in Citrus Heights CA. I felt actually seeing what I was buying and working
face to face with the person selling the system to me would improve my
ability to understand & be understood concerning what I wanted for my
business.

My business is a small upstart we have only been in business a year so far.
Our Product is an extremely tasty Barbeque Sauce called OL' Hippie Gourmet
BBQ Sauce in three levels of heat, Sweet n Smokey, Hot Licks, and
Outrageous(a shameless plug here) we make it all alone 5 gallons at a time
and create our own labels. As business grew it became clear a Laser printer
was in my future, lower cost than the ink-jet for sure but the print quality
of a laser is what I wanted, being a pretty fair photographer, the idea of
creating greeting cards of the local area could be very profitable ( we live
in a tourist area on the coast).
So I specifically told the sales person what it was I wanted & how much I
was willing to spend naturally the total came in higher that what I told him
but I was asking for specific things. The ability of this system to produce
high quality labels for my product was of PARAMOUNT importance. I also was
adamant about a very robust security/anti-virus/anti-Spam system.

I immediately had problems with the way the printer worked, color was great
but it couldn't print in the right spot on the page. Using standard Avery
name badge labels I print a background picture and superimpose the label
text on top, the labels were printing to the upper right of each label,
nothing I tried or Gateway tried or HP tried improved this at all. The
decision to replace the printer came from HP. Gateway shipped a replacement
printer same model even exchange.
Parallel to this problem my system began giving me driver errors when
connected to the internet. ? mm I thought it should be easy to fix for their
techs as it is their system and I had done nothing with it yet.
This was after 6 weeks of frustration with Gateway and their numb-skull
tech help. I don't wish to itemize every call but I spent no less than 6
hours a day trying to correct this problem over the span of that 6 weeks.
Then the replacement printer printed exactly as the first one did, I was
****ED, I had lost a lot of production time to the lack of labels, and was
unable to peddle my sauce with labels that looked like a 3rd grader printed
them. Not to give up early Gateway convinced me to try a Konica-Minolta
laser printer, ok now its close to 12 weeks into this nightmare, and guess
what? It printed worse than the HP !!!!!!.

I tried Gateways online live support with a tech via chat sort of. I
utilized that same thing with HP and it worked well. This guy asked me to
let him take over control of my mouse and keyboard and he would change some
settings and fix the problem........MY FATAL decision was to let him.
unknown to me he closed down a firewall or somehow disabled Norton and BAM
that was the end.

I found a Trojan Horse and finally gave up and demanded a full refund I
received the return authorization and packed it all up and shipped it back.

It has been 16 weeks total loss of production, THANKS GATEWAY

I will never deal with Gateway again their customer service is so bad it
works in reverse. I did find a few Gateway employees that were very good and
one in particular I wish to commend for his OUTSTANDING Customer Service,
Matt McAlpin the manager of the Gateway store ion Citrus Heights CA. He made
it right and I expect to have my money back buy this Friday.

Bruce Grieve
olhippieATcharterDOTnet