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At 01:10 PM 7/28/2005, Lee A Duynslager wrote: >One of the important things to consider is if a company will be in business once you have a warranty issue. This is something to consider, but my take is that given the reliability of desktop computers in particular, even if all the warranties on all our Gateway desktops were void today, the amount of money we would have to spend on any repairs that came up would be pretty low. Obviously I wouldn't be pleased about it, but in the big scheme of things it wouldn't affect us much. For notebooks (mostly Dells for us) I would feel differently, since we have many more failures and they tend to be more expensive ones. >My experience with gateway home systems is as follows: One of my users >purchased a gateway for home use. They had a problem with the system, but >by this time all the gateway stores had been closed. For warranty service >they were told they would have to spend $75 for shipping the machine back to >gateway to be fixed. The other alternative was to have M.S.U. engineering >look at the machine. Even though M.S.U. is a certified warranty provider >for gateway, gateway would only pay for the failed parts and not the labor >for the repair. It ended up costing $56 for the labor for a warranty >repair. (cough... cough). A good illustration of why buyers should pay more attention to the exact terms of their warranty. Instead they tend to shop price first and features second. All of our Gateways have a parts and labor warranty that includes shipping costs (although since we do our own repairs, the labor part hardly matters). --Chris ============================================== Chris Wolf Computer Service Manager Agricultural Economics [log in to unmask] Michigan State University 517 353-5017