I know I don't have any cred here since I haven't posted, but just wanted to give a heads up to anyone thinking about buying a Gateway product or an extended warranty in general.
I bought a decent laptop from their website about 2 1/2 years ago, and the thing has been rock solid up until this morning. Seriously, no complaints at all.
So I wake up this morning, turn the thing on and it hits me with a CPU fan error, and then shuts itself down. It had been off all night so it wasn't hot or anything, but now the fan doesn't spin on start up like it usually does. No problem though since I have a badass extended warranty with seriously every type of coverage possible.
I call up Gateway tech support, which of course is an automated system that has me enter my serial number, and then proceeds to tell me my warranty is now supposed to be honored by a company called MPC, which bought all of Gateway's "business division" warranties. It gave me their number, which I called, only to find about they filed chapter 11 about 6 months ago and were no longer responsible for honoring warranty claims. I was never once told by Gateway that my warranty had been sold to another company.
I call Gateway back, and since they won't let me get through to tech support (since my serial # indicated my warranty was owned by MPC), I had to talk to the sales people instead. To keep this short, I basically find out that Gateway is not honoring any of the warranties bought by MPC, even though I had a gateway computer with a gateway warranty. I talked to easily 10+ people and got the exact same story from every one, most with the same wording so it sounded like it came from a script (meaning lots of other compaints).
Normally, I wouldnt be so pissed about this, but the computer was about $1900, and the warranty was another $800 or so on top of that, and it still had another year and a half of coverage.
Thank god its just the fan (well hopefully just the fan, guess I won't know until I replace it). I just hope there's no major problem in the next 18 months.
I bought a decent laptop from their website about 2 1/2 years ago, and the thing has been rock solid up until this morning. Seriously, no complaints at all.
So I wake up this morning, turn the thing on and it hits me with a CPU fan error, and then shuts itself down. It had been off all night so it wasn't hot or anything, but now the fan doesn't spin on start up like it usually does. No problem though since I have a badass extended warranty with seriously every type of coverage possible.
I call up Gateway tech support, which of course is an automated system that has me enter my serial number, and then proceeds to tell me my warranty is now supposed to be honored by a company called MPC, which bought all of Gateway's "business division" warranties. It gave me their number, which I called, only to find about they filed chapter 11 about 6 months ago and were no longer responsible for honoring warranty claims. I was never once told by Gateway that my warranty had been sold to another company.
I call Gateway back, and since they won't let me get through to tech support (since my serial # indicated my warranty was owned by MPC), I had to talk to the sales people instead. To keep this short, I basically find out that Gateway is not honoring any of the warranties bought by MPC, even though I had a gateway computer with a gateway warranty. I talked to easily 10+ people and got the exact same story from every one, most with the same wording so it sounded like it came from a script (meaning lots of other compaints).
Normally, I wouldnt be so pissed about this, but the computer was about $1900, and the warranty was another $800 or so on top of that, and it still had another year and a half of coverage.
Thank god its just the fan (well hopefully just the fan, guess I won't know until I replace it). I just hope there's no major problem in the next 18 months.
