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Gateway Completes eMachines Acquisition
ryanjensen writes "Gateway just completed its $289.5 million deal to acquire Irvine, CA-based eMachines Thursday according to News.com. From the article: 'Many analysts believe that Gateway ultimately will abandon some or all of its namesake stores in favor of selling products at third-party retailers. However, they expect the company to continue selling Gateway-brand products, including PCs and consumer electronics, directly to its customers.'"
I'm not sure I get the general Gateway-hate among geeks. I have 5 computers here, one of them is a Gateway Pentium III 600. I've never had any problems with it whatsoever.
It came with Win98, which ran fine on the machine. Eventually I "upgraded" to WinME, which ran fine (at least as best as can be expected from WinME) on the machine. Now it runs Win2K, which runs fine on the machine. Everything aside from the OS is still factory. And while I've wiped the drive to upgrade Windows a few times, there's never been any trouble aside from the usual "Windows has been installed for 2 years, and it's getting slow as hell" that happens on any machine.
My only possible complaint is that the hard drive has gotten loud, when that thing's spinning, it's hard to think in the same room. I don't consider that Gateway's fault, though, as I've seen the same thing happen with countless drives.
--
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My experiences with eMachines have generally been negative. I hope Gateway will fix what's broken there, or they will really screw the pooch and end up hurting themselves more than helping.
Be excellent to each other. And... PARTY ON, DUDES!
Actually they have closed a lot of their stores as it seemed that they were bound to go out of business. However in the last year or so they have started making a lot of other products rather than just PC's. Maybe this will allow them to bounce back.
-NTidd
I've bought 6 of these things for my parents, inlaws, and friends. They're been great. My father has 3 at his small food processing business, I gave one to my inlaws, one to a friend and have one running my mail server.
Aside from the last one, each is essentially used for word processing, email, and web. And they do that well. Each has been in use for at least 2 years, and I've only had to perform one hardware related task on any one of them. (To be fair, my father jammed a screwdriver in the floppy drive to help get the disk out. Argh.)
They've been great machines for the non-computationally-intensive tasks that these people use them for.
I'm 6 for 6 and will continue recommend these machines for the casual user.
At my old company, I switched from Dell (bad support problems) to Gateway back in 2000. I bought their systems for the next couple of years, until forced into Compaq/HP by our corporate parent - but in my experience I was getting better quality systems in the old Gateway E-series desktops for less money than the Compaqs were costing. And when I or one of my techs called Gateway, we got to talk to a human who'd actually not make us go through all the clueless support hoops that a Dell or HP would. If we diagnosed a problem, the Gateway tech would actually believe us and send the part (if we needed it) withough giving us a line of BS.
And they'd also send us a real live sales rep who'd come to visit us a few times a year and show us the actual roadmap, so we could forecast our ordering appropriately. Dell and Compaq wouldn't bother doing that for us because we weren't big enough to justify actual face time (we had about 150+ users).
Nowadays, though, as I mentioned above what's left of my old company is living La Vida HP, reliability problems and all. And I've got my own place now, and I used Dell systems to set up my training lab (even though I can't stand 'em), because I just couldn't pass up the $150/box I was saving over the equivalent Gateway. Bummer. But that's the market position Gateway's been in. The big companies don't take them seriously versus Dell, HP, and IBM, and the little price-conscious companies can't afford them. At least eMachines helps them in the price-fixated marketplace.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
My experience with Gateway in 1999 caused me, as a Network Admin, to never buy Gateway again. My company bought 10 new "identical" Gateway PCs. When we received them in, I got ready to build one and clone the rest in order to make "standard" PCs. Well, lo-and-behold, the PCs weren't identical! Even though we had ordered all the same model # and specs, gateway had used different sound cards, video cards, network cards, etc. They all had the same "specs", but weren't really identical.
Pulling crap like that really increases the support costs for a corporate network.
Because of that, now that I'm in charge of determining what brands we buy, Gateway is not on my vendor list.
load "windows7"