Heck, talk about long memories.... Gateway, back in 93/94/95. Let's see - take your pick low-bid motherboard, low-bid power supply, low-bid monitor. We'll forget about bad ram, bad hard drives, and bad keyboards/mice. Absolute POS, and haven't bought one since.
For those that think this is thread crapping, when you buy 250 machines over a 6 month period, supposedly identical, and get 5 different motherboards, 8 different memory manufactures, 3 different monitor manufacturers, lost count of hard drive variations, this really sets the tone for a non-competitor in the business world. Consistency says a lot, the only consistency with Gateway was inconsistency, in parts, quality, and reliability. You could get the same set out of mom and pop's garage next door.
For Gateway employees: I'm one of the reasons you guys went down the crapper... screw us once, we may forgive you easily, you had great prices, screw us twice, we're leary, screw us three times or more, we never forget, nor do we ever go back. Dell should take heed, you're heading the same way. BTW, we sent back over 2000 bad monitors out of 4000 over about a 2 year period. (ie, I wasn't a small time buyer, but I didn't influence our whole organization at the time. Gateway was banned shortly after that - great customer service for parts gone bad doesn't make up for unneeded customer service. We were 100% Dell in 97-99, when I left, and that carried over for about 100,000 employees in 99. )
Let's say that even today, when I see a gateway computer, I see a clueless sucker, as I've never been convinced your policies have changed. (so I might be bitter, having to explain that much lost time and money would probably do that to anyone.)