It wouldn't surprise me if your Gateway laptop has something wrong with it. 1.5 years ago, I made the mistake of buying a Gateway, and had horrible problems running Linux on the machine. Win98 also crashed pretty often, but that's "normal behavior".
Needless to say, I got no joy from Gateway's tech support. They said the problems I was experiencing due to the fact I'd installed Linux on the machine, even after I'd wiped the drive and used the "Recovery CD" to completely restore the system. I eventually found out that the problem was due to a motherboard that had been built by the lowest bidder--replacing the board made Linux rock solid and cut '98 crashes in half.
They certainly can't support every OS
s/every/any/ and you're closer to the truth. Oh yes, there used to be these things called "standards" that specified how the pieces of hardware in an IBM-PC compatible system would work. There are even standards for laptops (PCMCIA, Cardbus, APM 1.2, etc.) though nobody seems to follow them. If you check the Linux Configure.help file, you'll see a couple of options in there that are for working around br0ken IBM Thinkpad APM behavior....
Re:Gateway wont support Windows 2000 on my noteboo (Score:2)
Needless to say, I got no joy from Gateway's tech support. They said the problems I was experiencing due to the fact I'd installed Linux on the machine, even after I'd wiped the drive and used the "Recovery CD" to completely restore the system. I eventually found out that the problem was due to a motherboard that had been built by the lowest bidder--replacing the board made Linux rock solid and cut '98 crashes in half.
They certainly can't support every OS
s/every/any/ and you're closer to the truth. Oh yes, there used to be these things called "standards" that specified how the pieces of hardware in an IBM-PC compatible system would work. There are even standards for laptops (PCMCIA, Cardbus, APM 1.2, etc.) though nobody seems to follow them. If you check the Linux Configure.help file, you'll see a couple of options in there that are for working around br0ken IBM Thinkpad APM behavior....