[3 of 3 customers found this review helpful]

Gateway FX6800-01e Gaming Desktop Computer Review

Nice features and nearly great, but one nasty flaw

"I hate to give this computer a bad rating, but I have to. You see, although the i7 920 is great, and the 4850 is great, and a lot of this computer was well thought out, it has a problem that caused me to return it.



Something causes Windows Explorer to constantly refresh when you open it. This is easy to see, the busy icon on the cursor continuously flashes when you're viewing all of the drives. This causes a problem when you try to use the drop down box in Vista to select anything, as the box will close from being refreshed.



The other thing that is probably related is that this computer, while idle, was averaging 6-8% processor usage. That's nuts. Something this powerful should be in the 0-2% range when nothing is running. I believe this is really the same problem as above, probably some device driver gone crazy which is eating up system resources.



I did all I could to try to figure this error out, but I was not able to. I uninstalled device drivers, anti virus software, disabled hardware, etc. I even formatted the computer and used the recovery partition and recovery discs, twice. Nothing worked.



The unfortunate thing is when checked out another FX-6800 at Best Buy, it was doing the same thing! So I feel that this problem is not limited to just the FX 6800 I'd purchased. And it's not Vista, I have never seen this behavior on any other Vista machines, and even other Gateway's do not exhibit this behavior.



The other unfortunate thing is that Gateway's customer support was terrible. They basically refused to listen to the real problem, and could only tell me to reinstall everything with the system recovery discs. Well, once you've done that once, you know that's no longer the problem. But I don't even think they were really reading what I was typing to them.



I'm honestly surprised nobody else has mentioned this problem. Possibly that means that not every machine is like this, just some. But I can say that the only two FX-6800s I've seen both did it. And though it's a problem I'm sure you can learn to live with, when you're spending good money on a machine which is pretty high performance, the thought of losing some of that performance because of some system problem was too much for me to want to deal with."