Gateway: A Rant for their documentation - Praise for their online help des

[drm604]

I bought myself a new computer. Because I need a new one, because I wanted to give myself a nice gift for getting a new (and better) job, and because the old one was not doing well with my new broadband connection. I started it up, configured it for my connection, hooked it up, and I had an internet connection which worked great.

Then I wanted to put all of my old stuff on the new machine, so I bought a special cable and software called "PC Relocator Ultra" which moves and installs all of the programs and data from a machine with an older operating system to a machine with a newer operating system using the special cable (an ethernet "crossover" cable).

The software worked great, but I discovered that a few programs didn't work well and would need to be installed manually, and other's conflicted with things in the new machine and would have to be abandoned.

I un-installed these programs. At that point the new machine became very unstable, complaining about things missing and giving me error messages on boot up. So I figured that I should restore it to it's factory state and then repeat the transfer process, this time not transferring the troublesome programs.

There is a CD which came with the system. It is labeled "Gateway, Microsoft Windows XP Professional, System Recovery CD/DVD". On it, it says things like "Use this disc to re-install your operating system" and "To re-install the operating system, programs, and drivers: (emphasis is mine) Insert this disc, close all programs, restart your computer, then follow the on-screen instructions". I did this and chose the "complete restore", "no backup" option when it came up on the screen, since I wanted to start from scratch and I had all of my important stuff still on my old system.

After the 15 or 20 minutes it took to do the install I finally booted back into XP. The desktop, the start menu, and the systray seemed strangely... empty. When I tried to follow the instructions for XP that I had gotten from my ISP I saw that I had a problem.

It tells me to open the network connections window and, within that window, to right click on the "Local Area Connection" icon. I had done this before and successfully entered connection data into the properties window for "Local Area Connection" But this time there was no "Local Area Connection" icon.

Poking around, I ended up in the device manager. In the device manager tree there is a section labeled "Problem Devices". All of the devices (about 1/2 dozen or so) in this section are overlayed with yellow question marks. When I look at their properties I see that each of them is missing a driver. When I try to fix them, the operating system in unable to find drivers for them. Among these "Problem Devices" in one called "Ethernet Adapter". Oops, that sounds like something I might need to connect to the Internet.

So it looks like what I've got is a plain vanilla version of Windows XP Professional with none of the OEM's additions, including drivers for their hardware, and firewall and anti-viral software.

I tried restoring the system several times thinking that I must be doing something wrong, but apparently I'm not. Apparently the disc which states very clearly "To re-install the operating system, programs, and drivers..." does no such thing. It simply installs a very stripped down version of Windows XP Pro.

So I got online with my old computer (the one I'm using to post this) and went to Gateway.com. I discovered that they have an online chat help desk so I decided that they could probably tell me exactly what to run to make the CD restore the original full factory install (after all, what is the point in having a recovery CD if it doesn't produce a usable system, right?)

After I explained my problem to Jason (probably not his real name) the first thing he asked was - had I made my recovery CDs?

My answer was "no, there is nothing that I can find in the documentation that says that I should.

He apologized and said that he would be mailing me a new hard drive with the full factory install and instructions on returning the old hard drive. He also pointed me to a web page which explained how to make a set of recovery CDs. These, in conjunction with the official "System Recovery CD/DVD" could then be used to do a full factory restore if it was ever necessary.

The new system is still under warranty so the shipping of the new hard drive and the return shipping of the old hard drive will be paid for by Gateway.

So, my rant is that Gateway provides a "System Recovery CD/DVD" that doesn't really do a system recovery, and then provides totally inadequate (possibly nonexistent) documentation about how to work with it. (It's probably on the disk drive somewhere... or at least it was until I trashed it.) Why don't they just have everything on the CD, or at least also include a set of program and data recovery CDs, or at the very least document clearly and prominently that you need to make recovery CDs and describe the consequences of not doing so. Grrr. :banghead:

My praise is for the customer support person, Jason, who immediately realized my problem and had an immediate solution. It wasn't a great solution (I was hoping for something like "boot with the CD And hold down F12"), but it was a reasonable solution under the circumstances, and Jason can't be blamed for Gateway's poor logistics.

Anyway, thank you for reading my rant and be forewarned.

[Rabrrrrrr]

1. I'm glad you got that solved! pain in the ass, but at least it worked.

And let me add this bit of advice: no matter what the "program transfer" program tells you, it's a fucking liar.

Reinstall every program manually. It's tedious, yes, but at least that way they'll actually work and your system will be configured properly.

Throw that goddamn thing away.

[KT2000]

2. Thanks for that tip

I was going to do some transferring myself.