[678] in resnet
Gateway E-3400 issues
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kevin Davis)
Tue Jan 22 10:03:34 2002
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII
Message-ID: <Pine.OSF.4.33.0201220947490.19229-100000@is05.fas.harvard.edu>
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 09:58:04 -0500
Reply-To: Resnet Forum <RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu>
From: Kevin Davis <ksdavis@FAS.HARVARD.EDU>
To: RESNET-L@listserv.nd.edu
I wanted to give all of you out there a heads-up for something you may be
experiencing (or about to experience) with any Gateway E-3400s you or
students purchased in fall 2000.
Over the course of this fall, we have seen a number of E-3400s locking up
and freezing all the time -- five to six times per day -- particularly
when attempting to access the Internet. (www.macromedia.com and
www.espn.com, to name just two, can make these machines crash in almost
every case.) Fresh format-and-reinstalls did nothing to resolve the
problem.
Some of the students sent their computer back to Gateway; in these cases,
Gateway swapped the hard disk drives, but to no avail -- the problem kept
happening.
We were kind of stumped over here until one of my UAs found the following
from an Indiana school district:
http://www.incolsa.net/archives/techies/msg00054.html
I contacted our campus computer store's manager, who worked with Gateway
to see what's going on. Sure enough, it turns out that this is a "known
issue" at some level at Gateway, and that some/many of the E-3400s
shipping in summer/early fall 2000 had defective motherboards.
We have as many as 90 students here with these computers; we're working to
contact them, get their serial numbers, and send them into Gateway to get
replacement motherboards.
I am hearing talk third-hand that Gateway is in the middle of putting
together a corporate program for these affected systems to get them
repaired/new motherboards, but I don't have any details on that. Still,
if you're seeing students with this problem, you might want to ping your
Gateway rep and see what's up. Our affected students have been very
frustrated with the situation and particularly Gateway's inability to
officially recognize what's been going on here, but they're glad that some
action is being taken.
(Of course, this is turning into a world-class time suck for me for the
better part of the month, but that goes with the territory...)
-- Kevin
+-----------------------------------------
|Kevin Davis
|Coordinator of Residential Computing
|FAS Computer Services, Harvard University
|ksdavis@fas.harvard.edu * 617.496.6064
___________________________________________________
You are subscribed to the ResNet-L mailing list.
To subscribe, unsubscribe or search the archives,
go to http://LISTSERV.ND.EDU/archives/resnet-l.html
___________________________________________________
