Bad Service

I had some abysmally bad customer service from Gateway yesterday, I only wish I was able to save the transcript of the online chat session I had with one of their techs. I was helping a student who had to reinstall Windows on his laptop, and Gateway didn't have the drivers on their web site for his network card. He'd managed to lose the Restore CD for his laptop, but had purchased a copy of Windows XP, so this should have been no problem, right? Wrong. Even though I'd already said that I had the wireless drivers working (which are on their site), the tech insisted twice that those were the network drivers I needed. After I made it clear that I was after WIRED networking drivers, he tried telling me that the only way to get those were off the restore CD. So, I asked what chipset was in the laptop, and after 10 minutes he came back and told me it was a Marvel-Yukon Gigabit PCI-Express chipset. I said "I guarantee to you that this laptop does not have that chipset". The laptop wasn't ancient by any means, but it was more than a year and a half old, and sure enough, while the tech was insisting I was wrong, I found that the laptop actually used the Broadcom 4401 chipset, and downloaded and installed those drivers with no problem, though the tech still insisted I was wrong...

Needless to say, "Simon" got a negative rating in the feedback section from me...