GAteway or Dell

[John Rutherford CCSULibrary 860-832-2082]

I have used both Gateway and Dell in our library. I have run about 20
to 25 Gateways for a few years now, ranging from 60mhz pentiums to
166mhz models. So far I have rarely had problems. One system died with
a bad hard drive after two years, another had ram that failed. I have
run win3.1, NT, linux, and bsdi on these sytems with no problems.

The Dell sytems I have had in the library have for the most part run
well though they cost more than the gateways. One problem I noticed, and
another note on this list mentioned this also, is that the on-board
ethernet failed on one system. This took a while to fix because Dell
first wanted to replace the transceiver. When this did not work they had
to replace the entire motherboard, so this took a while, and would have
been expensive if the system was not under warranty. If you buy
systems with on-board ethernet, you might want to keep a spare ethernet
card around for testing and learn how to disable the on-board ethernet.

If you buy gateways, go with their more expensive model monitors.


John Rutherford
Central Conn State univ.