the Stamford Research<br>Business Technology Journal: Gateway vs. Dell <br>Out with the Old, In with the New

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Wednesday, April 27, 2005

Gateway vs. Dell
Out with the Old, In with the New

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Bye Bye Dell ... I've finally, though disasterously, found a reason to rid myself of my Inspiron 5100 and replaced it with a Gateway AMD 64.
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Last Thursday, my Dell laptop suffered a disasterous hard-disk strike which left me laptop-less (more about that later). But, despite the loss of huge amounts of data, which will hopefully be recovered, I've now got the opportunity to replace this monstrous device.
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Why is my DELL Inspiron "monsterous" you ask? First - I bought 2 identical machines in 2003 (at more than $2,000 each) - one for me, and one for my wife and business partner. Mine started acting up. It would just turn off, lose the wireless connection, and otherwise behave badly. Eventually, after a zillion calls to Dell support, reloading and "fixing" the operating system and BIOS, I told the Dell guys that the problem was it was overheating. They didn't believe me. The final straw came when the plasticized tag on the bottom melted and turned curly-brown. My final call was to a supervisor who recognized the threat, and ordered a new machine for me. Fine. Two weeks after the new machine arrives, Tara's computer starts doing the same thing. After a bit of a runaround, I got DELL to replace that system as well.
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Then, keyboards fell apart, screens dimmed, batteries wouldn't hold a charge ... blah blah blah.
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With the disk crash, I needed a computer fast, so I went to Best Buy in Brandon, FL. I looked at all the offers and decided that the Gateway 7426GX was, bar none, the best price performance at $1,300. The machine has:

AMD Athlon 64 processor w/1 mb cache
1 GIG of main memory
100 GIG of hard disk
ATI Radion 9550 graphics
15.4" WXGA screen (the only bad part)

The machine comes loaded with a bunch of software like Norton, Microsoft Works, etc. I like the Norton anti-spam, anti-spyware. But I reloaded my McAfee firewall and virtus protection.
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So far the machine is great. Fast, lighter than the DELL, and runs significantly cooler than even the replacement machines DELL sent me. I also like the Radion card that allows me to spread my desktop display over two monitors (the LCD in the system and a NEC MultiSync LCD 1545V).
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The only downside is the display. They got 15.4" out of a widescreen display by shrinking the vertical height. The fonts display as though they were on a 12" to 14" display - which is way to small for my ageing eyes. I had to reset the font sizes for the system, and in a number of the applications. Of course, resetting font sizes in Internet Explorer makes some screens look VERY UGLY. Also, resetting the font sizes to make the WXGA screen readable makes the fonts HUGE on the freestanding NEC (can't seem to set them separately).
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Also bought a Maxtor 300 GIG USB drive for backup (yep, my old backup drive died in the move). Nice features with the Dantz Restrospect backup software too. But more about that later as well.
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The Bottom Line
First, I'll NEVER buy another DELL laptop, as long as I live. Second, out of the box, I like the Gateway, LCD screen issues aside. We'll see as time goes on. In the mean time, its off to DriveSavers to recover the hard disk (the Geek Squad at Best Buy slaved it to another computer, but it appears that the read/write heads are damaged).