71–80 of 102 posts
I set up perhaps a hundred of them in those years and did RMAs etc. They were good machines for the time, was happy with support. Built my own Frankenstein from extra parts.
As GW tripped over itself a few times we gradually started moving to Dells. :-/
Hilariously good. Imo they worked on me. I can quote Gateway 4DX622 at $1899 OTOH of my head now. And it got me to read the whole thing.
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Sure, but that's just lending you a computer at that point, unless they expect you to cover the depreciation cost or something when returning it.
I would guess you would owe some agreed value of the PC at the time you received it.
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Probably not china so much as Taiwan, japan, other places
Actually yes China. Hong Kong specifically before the manufacturing boom moved to mainland. By the 90s Japan had lost its DRAM edge and was not making any PC peripherals en masse. TSMC was barely three years old in 1990.
As a young Midwestern nerd in the 90s, getting one of those cow boxes delivered to our home was better than Christmas. (Christmas happens every year!). Somehow I can still remember the new computer smell…
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I would guess you would owe some agreed value of the PC at the time you received it.
From what I've seen where I work the majority of "work" computers and laptops don't get returned if the employee separates for whatever reason. So I can see some companies wanting to make it a formal loan or have some means to recover the lost value if it isn't returned. My employer doesn't, because the residual value of a 2-3 year old laptop is not even worth anyone's time beyond making a few perfunctory requests to…
The hippie copy mentioned was the ad my dad bought our first PC from. He was coming back from a business trip and asked the company computer guy to help him choose one for our family. We ended up with the 486DX2-50MHz "Integrated VESA System" [1]. Calling the Gateway 2000 customer support 800 number was my introduction to understanding computers and I am grateful to their staff for being patient with a 12 year old. W…
You had a better experience than I had. Bought a Gateway, the cheap hard disk in it went back within a few weeks. Took two calls to support (each putting me on hold for maybe 45 minutes) to get them to admit the hard disk was bad and each call was quite long I remember.
They sent out a raw hard disk and I had to install Windows and all the drivers by hand over the weekend because of course it is my fault they used the cheapest drives they could find.
I think they charged me for the new drive and said they would rebate it if they got the old drive back within a month. I think I was able to use the package they sent the replacement in to mail the disk back, but I had to pay the postage.
Good riddance to a bad company.