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Review 3/15/2010
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I purchased one of the last direct models of Gateway laptop in July of 2008, a P-173XL FX. Upon receipt of the laptop, I was pleased. The laptop appeared to be good quality and a fair price as advertised, and I had no problems for approximately 8 months.
Around March of 2009 the computer began shutting down unexpectedly. It didn't take long for me to figure out it was having heating issues, so I began to take extra special care to keep it cool. Despite my extra efforts, in September of 2008 the machine would not even enter BIOS, and I spent a day or two convincing the customer service agent that the machine was not functioning. At that point he told me to send it into their shop in Texas for repair, for which I had to pay shipping.
Luckily I had purchased the 3 year warranty, because September was just beyond the 1 year standard warranty expiration.
I was without my computer for approximately three weeks, and upon getting it back it turned out that the motherboard had fried, and they had replaced it. Between September 09 and January 2010 the computer worked as new, but in February 2010 it began exhibiting the same symptoms of shutting down as before. Since then I have been struggling with the Gateway customer service to obtain the thermal threshhold for malfunction in the laptop, to no avail. They insist that I call their three-dollar-per-minute technical service, despite the fact that my machine is still in warranty. I have done research on the specific hardware in my machine, and those manufacturers, like Intel and Nvidia, have their thermal data listed on their websites. Through software, I have accessed the internal thermometers and recorded temperatures of over 100 degrees Celcius, and Intel lists its thermal junction for the motherboard in my laptop at 105 celcius. Clearly the thermal design in this laptop was poorly constructed.
Once upon a time Gateway was an industry leader in customer service. Those days are long gone.
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