I hate my Gateway

[Tim]

God, I hate this thing. It's a not-yet three year-old Gateway, top of the line when it was new.

Now, it's crash city. It never boots down right, it crashes day in and day out, and simply drives me crazy and raises my blood pressure. I have to save documents every two words just in case something happens.

IhateitIhateitIhateitIhateitIhateit!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yes, it just crashed on me--again--for no particular reason, other than (gasp!) I was trying to copy photos onto a CD while I was actually doing some other work on the computer.

Perish the thought...how darest I overtax the precious machine.

Picture, in your mind, whatever entity you hate the most. Then imagine hating it 100 times more. That's where I am with this computer.

Tim, Mr. Calm.

[Jon 0n TAHANI]

Tim,
Now calm down and get yourself a DeLL :)
Good luck

[Tim]

Already done! I need my computer too much to mess around. My current hard drive sounds like a 1976 diesel just before it seizes up from lack of lubricating oil.

For once, I actually found that one of those deals you see in the ads actually gave me a system I could use. How could I turn down a $150 rebate, free 2nd bay CD/RW drive, free upgrade to 60 gig harddrive, free 256K RAM...all for a grand total of 1/3 what I paid for this piece of junk three years ago.

Sorry, Mac users...I just couldn't make the switch just now.

Ships May 1 or before. Duuude!

Tim

[dasein668]

Tim, Tim, Tim. Tsk tsk. You know its not the machine: its the operating system. Stay far away from anything Microsoft and all your troubles will be over.

Have I ever mentioned how I feel about microsoft? hehe.

[Tim]

Yeah, yeah, yeah...yipe, yipe, yipe! hehe

Watcha gonna do...

:-P thbbbt

Tim

[good goose]

Tim
My harddrive made the sound you described and I also got a Dell. I took my old one apart and found that the growling culprit was actually a cooling fan for the pentium chip. A 29.00 fix There was also an incredible amount of dust inside. It was still slow but better for the week I used it until my Dell arrived.

3 years in the computer world is equal to about 40 in the sailboat world. When I told a tech at my computer shop what system I had 5years old top of the line. He said "buy a new one there are games that have more memory then your computer". So I did and it is amazingly better. I'm sure a new one will be needed in another five years. At least they keep getting cheaper.

Brock Richardson

[Mark Elite32 Hopkinton MA]

I manage the IT infrastructure where I work and we lease PC's over three years and yes it's too long. For our high end J2EE developers we replenish their machines every 12-18 months, moving out there old machine (still under lease) to back office /operations staff and bringing them the latest and greatest productivity tool.

Bottom line software and applications continue to exceed the needs of the user within less then three years.

On the home front :
We have a "new" Gateway which we got at Christmas for <$500. 60G HD, 48 CDRW etc - didnt bother with monitor etc as we re-used these. We also have a 266Mhz laptop, the 'old' 266mhz 'no-name' desktop PC and a 100mhz machine running Linux.

[dasein668]

Ok Tim, it was supposed to be here today. Where's the report? Is is all you could have hoped for?

Or is it leaving you wishing you had bought a Mac?

;-P

[Tim]

It arrived right on schedule at about 1715. Pretty impressive, really--I ordered it last Friday. (Today, for those of you who might read this well after the fact, is Wednesday the week after).

It's unloaded but I haven't set it up yet. I may not get a chance to really get into it for a day or two--I'm in the middle of a couple things and can't do the "two-computer juggle" immediately.

Full report ASAP!

Tim