From what I've gathered. Old Gateways were good, new ones are not. Old Asus were excellent, new ones are middling to good. ThinkPads excellent then, excellent now.
Gateways did used to be good - years ago. But then they were bought out by Acer. Gateways are now Acer's fancy budget models - essentially eMachines with a nicer logo.
Yeah, the i5-2430M Win7 Gateway laptop I bought in 2011 continues to be functional. Unfortunately, good batteries are no longer available. So now it manages my wireless hot spot via an Ethernet cross-over cable, not wanting to connect yet another device to my LAN. Anyhow, I've noticed retailers list existing Win10 stock, "Free Windows 11 Update." I wonder how that's working out?
As much as I don't like the Acer brand, I have to say that my laptop bought in 2010 with Win7 no SP is still going strong. Sure it came bundled with bloat but I've replaced the HDD with a SSD and clean installed Win10 since. The only other things I've done were increased the RAM to 8GB and replaced the battery, oh and regularly blow the dust out of it.
Krusty, that's a wonderfully long life-span for your Acer laptop--12 years almost. You hear about "well laptops aren't supposed to last but five years" or so; clearly that's not universal.
Good laptops can last forever, well beyond 5yrs. I have Toshiba Satellite A75-226 from 2005. I bumped memory to 1GB and replaced harddrive once or twice just in case. And new battery once. It's plugged in most of the time. It has an ancient parallel port, CD/DVD drive, USB2 ports and works great to this day. XP-Pro and Linux Mint work fine too. I don't use it too much on the wild web these days. 16 years isn't bad, is it? Lenovo ThinkPad T430s from 2013 works fine so far with Windows 7 and 10. So it's a youngster, just 8yrs old.
Well, forever is a long time - and nothing, including good laptops last forever. I too had a "good" laptop, also a Toshiba and it lasted well over 10 years. In fact, it was retired before it died because its specs could not keep up with my changing and increasing demands. Also its original battery was dying, barely providing 1 hour of run time. I decided to buy a new notebook rather than spend money on a replacement battery - for which only 3rd party replacements were available. The truth is, even the best brands can have units that fail prematurely. And even the most budget brands and models can provide many years of reliable service - this is especially true with electronics, and in particular, computers because they are all assembled with components made by someone else! Acer, for example, does not make the CPUs, GPUs, RAM, drives, chipset, monitor screens, sound chips, or just about any other component. They just put them all together - just like every other notebook maker. The truth is, the longevity of electronics is greatly dependent on how it is treated and used during its life time.
But what I don't understand is how can they be so cheap, are the components like RAM, motherboard, SSD and monitor perhaps from a way lower quality?
For one, due to stiff competition, the profit margins are very slim. Also, manufacturing techniques have improved over the years, becoming much more efficient (in terms of time), and automated. For example, much of the assembly involves their factory robots "snapping" parts together instead of using expensive human employees assembling those parts with screws. And last, Acer (which again, also owns Gateway, eMachines, AOpen and bunch of other companies), can go to Micron, WD, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and other component makers and promise to buy 1,000,000 units over the next 3 months. With that kind of buying clout, they can demand and get huge, discount volume prices. And that allows them to build very affordable devices.
OK, so they are probably not that bad when it comes to components. I was quite surprised that they can offer such specs for only $400 to $600 dollar, they seem to be the cheapest machines on the market. In Europe, it's mostly Lenovo that gives you quite a lot of bang for the buck. From what I understood, IdeaPad's 3 and 5 are pretty good. I use an IdeaPad 3 (14 inch) myself, it's a pretty nice machine.
The motherboards are the weak link. Also I don't think Acer owns Gateway anymore. I think Gateway is now owned by more of a bargain basement company.
I have a Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop, 17 years old. I check it every year to see if it's still working. It's slow but quite usable. Physical condition is like new. It was never given much work. I think it cost 3 or 4 thousand Au dollars. Screen resolution 1600x1050 (very clear) Intel Pentium M CPU 2.00 GHz 1 GB RAM Windows 7 and Linux Mint 19.3 (it came with WinXP) 60 GB IDE HD (7200 rpm) Original battery still working
Well, you get what you pay Just two seconds with any browser or our friend Bing Google shows it is indeed still owned by Acer. See https://gatewayusa.com/ then scroll to the bottom where you can clearly see they still are an Acer controlled company.
So in other words, you still believe some of the components must be of a lower quality. I've looked it up on Wikipedia, and what he probably means is that Acer has sold the Gateway branding and licensing rights to Bmorn Technology, a Chinese company. According to Wikipedia, these devices are not designed, produced or manufactured by Acer and are sold via Walmart.
