Once in a blue moon, I have to do what mere mortals do and contact OEM tech support. Usually, this is because of a question with a warranty with one of my customers’ PCs, or some obscure technical note…

Anyhow, I’ve officially had my second encounter with Gateway support, and I have to say it was a horrible experience (the first was also bad). Here’s the scenario. I just got a PC rebuild job for a new customer that had his entire Windows installation blow up, the disk was unbootable, yada, yada, yada. I yanked the drive, was able to recover the few files he had on the machine, put the drive back in, and boot from the Gateway Recovery CD. So far, so good.

XP reloaded just fine. Next step was to install SP2, but before I did that, I checked the BIOS and saw it there was a newer BIOS version available on the Gateway Web site. Updating the BIOS is just habit, something I find is especially good to do before installing a major OS update.

The first hassle was how they packaged the update. It didn’t even create a bootable BIOS update disk… you had to unzip the files, then get a pre-formatted IBM floppy, then copy all the files over to it. Mind you, you couldn’t just format a floppy, the README advised, it had to be pre-formatted. Well, no problem, I’ve got pre-formatted floppies. So I copied the files over. I rebooted, but the PC would simply not boot up from this floppy, despite the fact it looked like it had the requisite boot files on it.

So I started a chat with Gateway tech support. I wished I had saved the transcript - it was comical. I may still get an e-mail copy, but maybe not. The tech told me that they did not advise customers to ever update their PCs’ BIOS, because it could cause problems. OK, so why post BIOS updates on your Web site? When I pressed him, he said he wasn’t the person to talk to, then gave me a toll-free number I could call for a tutorial. The call was free, but you’d need a credit card to get more “technical” assistance. So what was the point of the “Chat with a Tech” button on their Web site?

This may be old news to many of you. We’ve all read about, and experienced, bad tech support. But if you are reading Lockergnome’s IT Professionals, chances are you rarely have to rely on OEM tech support. But for the average Joe or Jolene, unless you have a saavy family member, you have little choice. And in this day and age, with all that can (and will) go wrong, the average consumer is bound to feel quite frustrated.

I’m sure not every interaction with Gateway Support can be as bad as mine (0 for 2, if you are keeping score). But it makes my experiences with Dell, HP, and Apple seem like Nirvana.