Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pallas!kabra437
From: kabra437@pallas.athenanet.com (Ken Abrams)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.misc
Subject: Re: Gateway 2000
Message-ID: <436@pallas.athenanet.com>
Date: 7 Nov 90 21:48:55 GMT
References: <1990Nov5.190436.20695@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> <10183@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu>
Reply-To: kabra437@pallas.UUCP (Ken Abrams)
Organization: Athenanet, Inc.,  Springfield, Illinois
Lines: 44

In article <10183@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu> lee@uhccux.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Greg Lee) writes:
> 
>" 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
>
[Author's minor reservations]

>(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 manual for a VGA card is almost a necessity; glad that you got that
straightened out.  As for the rest of your comment, I don't know of
ANY major PC supplier that supplies all the manuals and schematics
you seem to want.  Most mail order companies don't even make them
available at extra cost.  I have heard that Compaq won't sell them
to end users at all and I think they still can be had for IBM
machines at SUBSTANTIAL extra cost.  What you got (or didn't get)
from Gateway is the norm in the industry and not the exception.

>
>(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

Those figures seem low to me too.  I have a 2 year old 20 mhz '386
from Gateway that does better than that.  I suggest that you run
it again while booted on a "virgin" system.  If the figures still
come out that low, I would be having another pow-wow with Gateway
before the 30 day grace return period expires.  If they claim that
your set-up is running at 0 wait states, it should do better than 
that.

All of the above is just my opinion; any resemblence to fact is
purely coincidental.

-- 
========================================================
Ken Abrams                     uunet!pallas!kabra437
Illinois Bell                  kabra437@athenanet.com
Springfield                    (voice) 217-753-7965