Gateway Complaint - Do Not Buy A Gateway - ML3109 - Laptop

Posted by superbowl on 2007-10-02:

Sorry to hear of your problems. Gateway is one of the brands we recommend to our clients. I use a Gateway Media model fully loaded with 4G of ram and it has never failed me in a year now. I got one of the last ones with XP as I did not want to be the guinea pig with Vista. I might suggest your issues are with Vista more than the box? Send me an email and I will see if I can help you out. Send me any error messages you may be getting if you send me an email. Good luck!

Posted by Too Good To Be True on 2007-10-02:

superbowl: great help !
<;O)

Posted by Extended Warranty on 2007-10-02:

"This company does not provide a quality product to the consumer and refuses to take any steps to make the problem right"

Or is it that they do offer a quality product and you chose the $349 model? Don't be blaming Gateway for your penny pinching. FYI, the cheapest laptop will require the cheapest parts.

Posted by LarryDan on 2007-10-03:

Most of these bottom of the line computers are running on Vista home basic with 512 MB of ram. Nothing illegal about it, they will run, just not near maximum. You should be able to pick up another 512 at a reasonable price (try newegg!) to put in the machines and better your user experience. However you're still running Vista, so probably not. Hopefully their first service pack will elminate most of the Vista problems.

Posted by Furko on 2007-10-03:

I am with you, having posted my own review about 22-inch Gateway LCD monitors on the same day that yours came out (10/02).

I was amazed, really, that there is NO WARANTY with a Gateway product. There was nothing in either boxes, and I finally had to call directory assistance to get a toll number for them.

Yes, ACER purchaserd GATEWAY in September. This was not a "merger" but an outright purchase by one company of another. ACER is crazy is they don't kill off the Gateway brand. If they don't, it is just going to bite them in the fanny eventually.

With respect to "Gateway Tech Support," the day after I paid good money for these monitors, I was on a toll-call on my dime, being told that to get help will cost me $79.95. Apparently, Gateway is making aditional money out of the fact that their products stink to Kingdom Come.

Furko

Posted by JSU05Grad on 2007-10-13:

I wish I would have seen this write up sooner. I purchased my ML3109 when my Dell Inspiron 1100 finally went out. I basically bought the Gateway b/c it was light, nice looking, and cheap. I thought it would be good considering I only need it for the internet. Well, turns out this computer even sucks for using only the internet!

Does anyone have this same problem:

I will be using the internet and suddenly the page will upload to another "Gateway Search" page that says that link could not be found. Most of the time the link shown on the search page is UNKOWN to me. I have no idea where it came from or anything. I try to go back to the previous page, but then it will always take me back to that dang Gateway Search page. Am I the only one that is having this problem?!

It tends to happen a lot on MySpace.com, but still happens occassionally on other sites such as Yahoo and Hotmail.

Any thoughts on how to fix it?! HELP ME!

Posted by propmgr on 2007-10-18:

I don't have that problem, I've got a different one. Is anyone having this one:

The computer won't power off all the way at shut down.... I have to turn off via the power button, at next boot up I have to power up in safe mode and then restart. UGH!

Posted by superbowl on 2007-10-18:

PropMgr, you have some bad stuff in your system registry. There are a couple good cleaners out there, one I like is Ccleaner.com. Download it and run the cleaner, then registry cleaner then click on tools, startup and remove all the programs you do not need to load when your PC starts (which will be most of them). Then do a good defrag and all should be well again. Good luck!

Posted by JSU05Grad on 2007-10-21:

I've learned that you can uninstall this "Gateway Search Page" and that seemed to help. If you ever has the same problem I am having, then once the search page comes up there is a link that you can click to show what to look for and how to uninstall the program. It may be called something different than "Gateway Search."

I have uninstalled the program and it seems to work better; however, if a page cannot be pulled up, then it will just show an internet explorer page. I still have to reload the page.

Any suggestions? See my post on 10/13/2007 for further explanations.

Posted by panamax on 2007-11-10:

A friend purchased this model. I was appalled at its performance; too slow, poor wireless performance, excess oem add ons, intolerably long boot up time. When I discovered only 512 mb Ram I was blown away. I could not believe they would put it out w less than 1 Gb or Ram.

We purchased 2MB of Ram and that pretty much solved most of the problems, BUT boot up is still on the slow side. So spend $100 for some good RAM and this machine will thank you for it.

Posted by dongeorge on 2007-12-02:

I recently purchased a refurbished Gateway computer via Tiger Direct Canada.

Thankfully, within the 90 day warranty, a problem came up, which was covered. However,
the service that Gateway's Utah based call center provides to Canadian clients, is one of the worse experiences I've had in 25 years of being a consumer.

Since I bought the machine on an "in-person" basis at a Tiger Direct retail location, the Gateway call center was not able to find a record of my purchase. Apparently, all they're able to see is online purchases.

So I had to fax my photopied receipts in. Scan and email as an attachment was not an option. This is a technology company in 2007, and fax was their only means provided for this type of communication. Tell me that's not user difficult. I acknowledge there are some that don't have access to a scanner, so the fax channel needs to exist for that group of people, but anyone else who can scan and email, should have email delivery as an option.

I have to believe that managing email and attachments is far easier than the trials of managing a fax machine and all of the associated problems that can go wrong with that medium.

I faxed 3 or 4 times, and then when they still didn't have my fax, I decided I had enough and called Gateway's head office in California. Luckily, I got through to someone right away, and he provided me with his email address and I sent the receipts.

A new power supply was on it's way to me the same day. My pc would not boot up, only the fan, so this new power supply was their first attempt at fixing same.

I get the power supply a few days later, and install it, and it didn't rectify the problem. I call back into their Utah call center, and I'm advised then it has to be the motherboard. So it's arranged for DHL to drop off a box, which I would pack the machine in, and they'd deliver it to their repair vendor here in the Toronto area.

That process goes smoothly. The repair vendor receives the machine, which I verify via the DHL website a day after it left my house.

4 days later, I decide to call into the Gateway call center to check up on the status of repairs on my machine, and find out when I might be able to expect it's return.

Here's where the next big problem erupts. The young lady that took my call, was either too lazy to read all of the file notes, or she just didn't have access to the all of the file notes...not sure which, but she had no record of my machine being picked up by DHL, and she wasn't able to track my machine.

She then decided that I need to be transferred to "retail sales dispatch" to find my machine, which made no sense to me, since this was a service/warranty issue. I didn't need to be transferred to a sales dispatch department.

I immediately ask her, before she transferred me, to speak with a manager. 10 minutes of hold time later, I finally get a manager who provides me with a response that made a bit of sense: it could take as much as 7 business days if parts are not in stock with the repair vendor. I'm still left with the feeling that this was a canned response however, and even this manager didn't really know what was happening with my computer.

You'd think that Gateway would provide a portal / database for their repair suppliers to use, to communicate status.

I hang up, still not knowing what was happening with my machine. I email the gentleman back at the Gateway head office in California explaining all of this and requested his help.

4-5 hours later the same day....I'll never know for sure if the guy in the Gateway head office was involved or not....my computer arrives at my house via DHL.

I plug everything back in, and everything is now working fine. That was 2 days ago. We shall see how things go from here.

The service repair vendor that Gateway has hired...Decision One Canada....did a good job.

That call center of theirs in Utah, either does not have access to the correct tools to do a good job, or they're simply too damn lazy.

For that reason alone, I will think twice before ever buying another Gateway Computer again.

Posted by imnotrich on 2009-12-27:

I've had 3+ years of good luck with my ML-3109 so far, of course I knew enough about computers to know that 512mb wasn't sufficient for vista and I immediately installed 2gb. Until this weekend, the only issues I had related were Vista problems and also the junk drivers for the wireless card (realtek 8185 extensible b/g). No driver updates from gateway of course. On several occasions I was ready to upgrade to XP. And forget about warranty. My past experience with both Gateway and E-machines is that they will refuse to honor the warranty and in the unlikely event they will issue an rma they will send your computer back unfixed. Gateway/E machines call center personnel are rude, abusive, abrasive, dishonest, they will cuss, they will refuse to connect you to their supervisor and they WILL hangup on you. Well today I noticed the cpu cooling fan is not doing an adequate job and there is no easy way to access it. Poor engineering. But that's the thing about laptops today. Even the more expensive ones are throw away items. But disagree with the post about $300 laptops. For $300 I should be able to get a product that works.

Posted by CheapLaw on 2010-12-07:

I have advice for students to purchase a cheap laptop. The ML3109 is a fine piece of machinery. It allows you to replace the keyboard. That in of itself is huge. You can find parts easily. The piece of sh*t Vista went. I bought the ML3109 for about $100 too much, but it worked as is. I got an OEM version of Windows 7, reformatted the hard drives, and installed 7. Viola the system is fast and runs. You will need 1GB memory that is a given, but after that no problems. I got this because of Exam Pro's requirements. Netbooks and the anything from Apple are a joke for serious school work. Buy used ML3109 and do as I have done and viola a good boat anchor of a computer for your school work.