Acer to Buy Gateway in $710 Million Deal

Adios, Gateway.

Gateway was a nice marketing maker back in the early 1990's. But since Dell and HP/Compaq kept improving, they all left Gateway in the dust. But I have to admit, it was a nice way of getting a good starter PC.

Its almost an end to an era there. Since Gateway will probably be a marketling line of PC's, its not like its dieing completely. Oh well, the only Gateway I ever used was my brother's system he bought back in 1997. But that system died in 2002 and he gutted the gateway components. Only the case was spared and was used for an updated Pentium 4 system. That was the first and last time our family used Gateway. Oh well, it will make a nice note in the Computer History books.

I was out of practice. My bad. ;-)

"(I could not resist. I tried. I really did.)"

Then you should know that [sic] should be lowercase, and in brackets. :-)

(I could not resist. I tried. I really did.)

In my experience at a helathcare company with over 1500 employees, our IT department is segmented into various practices - developers, server support, storage admin, desktop support, bio-tech, etc. Each group has responsibilities beyond what is obvious based on thier group's name. It is more fiscally responsible to bulk order the desktop PCs and keep a stock of replacement parts and systems, and to work through the vendors' RMA process for warranty issues. Thats the way it is in all large corps, to my knowledge.

Your model may work in a small to mid-sized business, though...

--tayme

"Waethorn, most larege companies bulk order PCs from a distributor such as HP, Dell, or Gateway. PCs are treated as commodities, and rightfully so."

i just see it like this: if a company is a certain size, their IT department should be appropriately sized also. if an IT department is well trained, their preventative maintenance should be automated and they need only react to problems as they arise, which shouldn't be that common. major companies will be planning deployment on a schedule, and deployment will consist of prebuilt software images (which honestly doesn't take that long to create, or to test).

so, for the most part, if an IT department is well trained and experienced, they should be sitting on their hands most of the work day.

why not put them to good use and build some computers to save the company money? business deployments often have recurring system designs to streamline asset management, so it's not like it takes much to test software deployments in a network lab when all of your systems are the same.

in my heyday, i built as many as 19 PC's from retail parts in a single 8-hour day, ready-to-ship. software imaging takes no time at all - the majority of the time was taken from just doing the actual assembly. even a very average system builder can build 12 PC's in a work day. at the end of the month, that's 240 systems.

XP