You did what? Hey everyone, this guy is playing some kind of joke, right? I'll tell ya what, if you hate the Gateway so much why don't you give it to me? You couldn't pay me to take the HP.
I'll have your Gateway running better than "out of the box" in about an hour and it will stay that way. I'll bet you just loaded your lousy OEM software on it or worse, you left the preloaded stuff on and of course, after time and a few misuses and abuses later it crashed. I'll bet it's running WIN ME too. *gag*
Next time buy a gateway and the first thing you do is "format c: /u". Then you make hi-tech coasters out of those OEM disks, you get the idea. Also one of the worst things you can do to a gateway is to do what their technical support tells you. BIG MISTAKE.
Sounds like that Gateway's problem was most likely operator error. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Just wait till the newness wears off of the HP. You think you had garbage before...