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This beauty came with Vista Home Premium 64 bit, a triple core AMD Phenom 8450 processor, large 500 gig hard drive, 4 gig of DDR 2 memory, ATI Radeon HD 3200 Graphics card and a nice DVD burner. Symantec Norton 360 came installed from Gateway with a 60 day subscription and the customer extended the subscription for 1 year. I personally have had a number personal computers with the Norton 360 product, and I do not think much of it. Most of them have viruses galore, and many other problems such as not being able to remove the software, broken live update feature and slowed performance. I personally have never used the product on my own computer, if they want me to review it they can send me a free subscription. This particular computer had well over 2800 viruses according to Malwarebytes.org and the norton 360 product reported that it was up to date. I decided to remove to norton product and install Kaspersky 2010, I read somewhere earlier this month that it was rated #1 at this time, I realize these reports change month to month but I might as well start with a product that works at least.
I had to try and restore the thing to its factory default settings, with that many viruses on it a repair was out of the question, doing a full install from the "recovery" partition proved to be more difficult that one might think. The Gateway came with some nice hardware with the exception of the memory as it turns out. One stick is bad! They used a cheap RAM made by a company in Korea called Hynix Semiconductor Inc. The memory is not covered under a lifetime warranty like most memory, not sure what Gateway was thinking, probably saved a few dollars. With a bad stick of ram the computer was really acting goofy, rebooting, blue screen of death, freaked out display. I removed both sticks and installed one at a time to determine what stick was bad and what one was good.
After I got the memory issue figured out I then discovered that recovery partition was putzed up, you are supposed to press "Alt + F10" to boot into the gateway recovery mode, this did not work and the result was some error about editing the boot partition. I couldn't figure what they wanted me to do, so I downloaded a copy of the Ultimate Boot CD and used it to edit the partitions and I set the Recovery partition to active and the C: to inactive. Once the menu finally came up, there is one item on the list called recovery, that's not the right one, click the last item on the list, imaging or something?? Why these companies feel the need to be cryptic with this stuff is beyond me. I even found an internet post from someone with one of these who said Gateway wanted to charge him for the procedure, glad I stumbled across it by clicking all the links.
After the Full System recovery finally ran, the installation of Vista Home Premium went ok, but there is not one software that is a full version, they must all be removed, loaded with trial versions and crapware. I downloaded some good versions of free software, like open office and shipped the computer back to the owner.
myke
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