ureadit

A few years back, I decided to mothball an old Gateway PC that I’d purchased back in 2002. I hadn’t scavenged it for parts, so it remained intact at the back of the coat closet under the stairs. Quite frankly, I forgot I had it until I went digging through the coat closet about two weeks ago. “Oh yeah,” I said when I stumbled across it. “I remember this thing. I wonder if it still works.” I thought it might be worth spending some time to see if it worked, and if so, it would make a nice desktop for my wife, who’s been using an old beat-up laptop for the past year or so.

So I plugged in the little beast, turned it on, and it came to life. It ran, albeit very slowly. My senile 50-year-old brain suddenly remembered that before I mothballed the PC, it was under heavy use for a year or two, and registry-induced constipation had slowed it to a crawl. I decided to reinstall XP on it and see if I could get it running at a decent clip again.

Unfortunately, I had no idea where I left the disks with all the drivers. So when the newly installed XP operating system came to life, it could not find the speakers, the network card, the USB port, or anything. In fact, I could only run it in the 640x480 screen mode, which looked really dorky on a screen capable of 1920x1080.

I prepared to contact the folks at Gateway and see if they could help. Knowing that the PC was nearly 8 years old, however, I didn’t figure I’d have much luck. But I’m happy to say that I was wrong.

 

  

 

Gateway’s support website keeps track of every PC they ever sold. The PCs are referenced by serial number. All I had to do was get the serial number off the back of the machine, and within a minute, I had access to all the drivers and user manuals I would need. Instead of keeping a copy of the original drivers, the Gateway site keeps the latest updates, so I was able to download all the latest software I needed. Furthermore, the user manual contained exact information I’d need in order to upgrade the system memory from a whopping 256MB to 1.256GB.

Over the span of about 6 hours (spread over the period of a week or so), I had the Gateway humming like new again. It was a good experience, and I was grateful that the folks at Gateway kept their records intact. I’m not sure if other big PC manufacturers offer the same service; if not, it would be advisable for them to start. Buying a PC is a big investment, and you never know how long the thing will last. If you’re like me, you’ll lose the driver disks, but it’s comforting to know that the manufacturer has your back covered.

Best,

Dan

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