Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!munnari.oz.au!uhccux!lee
From: lee@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Gateway 2000
Message-ID: <10183@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Date: 6 Nov 90 15:17:46 GMT
References: <1990Nov5.190436.20695@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>
Organization: University of Hawaii
Lines: 37

From article <1990Nov5.190436.20695@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>, by brian@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Brian Hoffman):
 
" What's the scoop on Gateway 2000?  Has anyone had good/bad luck with their
" computers?  I'm interested in their $1995 386sx.

Notices in this newsgroup have been favorable.  On the strength of that,
I bought one, a "VGA 386/25MHz", which arrived one week ago (4 weeks
after I ordered it).  After 6 days, the video display scrambled, and
Gateway is sending me a replacement ATI card.  Aside from the fact
that it is not working right now, I have some minor reservations
about the system:

(1) There was no paper documentation for either the ATI video card
or for the hard disk drive, which is a Western Digital "Caviar 280"
85.3meg.  Also nothing on the power supply or the floppy drives.
A Gateway technician agreed to send me a manual for the video card
but said he had nothing available on the hard drive.  None of the
documents that did come with is specific enough to include schematics.

(2) The CPU+RAM seems a little slow.  I ran the Norton 5.0 sysinfo
program and got these figures: CPU 15.7, Disk 6.6, referenced to
the performance of an XT.  Norton gives comparison figures for a
"Compaq 386/20e 20MHz": CPU 20.5, Disk 6.4.  Sysinfo also reported
an av. seek time for the disk of 14.96ms and data transfer rate
of 655K/sec.  (I had the Windows 3.0 disk cache in place when I
ran this test.)  This Gateway model does not have a RAM cache and
with only the 4 megs of RAM on the motherboard that it comes with,
it does not do interleaved memory references, though apparently it
would if supplied with an additional 4 megs.  I asked whether I
could expect a little more speed if I did plug in more chips and
was told no, not necessarily.  Interleaving might slow it up.

(3) Windows 3.0 is bundled, and I thought I would be getting "Daybook",
the sample Toolbook application.  However, that was not included,
and Gateway cannot supply it.

				Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu