My big gripe about the major pc manufacturers is that I find that most companies use the exact same vendors for parts, so I can't recommend one company over another based on parts reliability.  That's where support becomes important.  When one of the mass produced parts goes defective (and something will,) that's where the quality of support becomes important.  Other than what Troy has said about the level of engineering / hardware certification that goes into corporate vs home systems, I've seen as many brand-x hard drives die from Dell workstations that I would from a Gateway filled office.

When it comes to re-imaging a system, there are some instances where it is the only solution if you want something to work right.  In such a scenario, the pc is so cheesed up from corrupted dll's or other bad files, you don't want anything from the previous system to remain.  It is unfortunate that tech support recommends the shotgun approach in order to keep their volume of calls up.

As far as Gateway, I've had good and bad experiences.  On the weekends, they seem to have some overseas, probably Indian people giving tech support and you can hardly hear them or understand them.  I am always skeptical of anything they tell me to do.

That said, getting their 3 year warranty was a good thing because so far it's gotten me a new power unit, keyboard, video card, and motherboard (because of an unusuable port).

If you have a problem and get a good tech guy on the phone, make sure you get his badge # and voice mail if you have problems in the future.

Edited to add that Gateway tech people have had me make changes to my pc that didn't solve my problems and actually made things so bad one time I had to use System Restore to get me back to where most things were working good again.  Doing that creates problems too, especially with anti-virus software, but that's another story.

Man, I am -really- sorry to hear about your loss, I had a similar situation years ago where my brother deleted my entire personal folder heirarchy.  Luckily, this was back in the days of Windows 3.1 / Windows 95 (don't remember), and I was able to drop down to DOS and manually recover most of my files by editing the file tables by hand ...

But anyway, let me humbly add one suggestion:

-TAKE IMPORTANT PHOTOGRAPHS ON FILM-

Film, as you know if you've seen your grandparents, great-grandparents, etc., can last over 100 years.  We don't even know if in 30 years we will have computers and programs to read "jpeg" formatted data.  Sure we may, but who knows.  Kind of like if you have a nice betamax home video sitting around now and you never got around to transferring it -- you're either hosed, or you have to pay through the nose for a company to change your home movies to DVD...

Again, I'm really sorry about your wedding and honeymoon pics.  I'm getting married next year and while I'll let her bring a digital camera, my trusty Nikon is coming along as well.

All the best,
James

Bottom line - Gateway sucks! I've had nothing but trouble with this gateway computer.

Years ago, Gateway's manufacturing and sales grew at such a rate that their support could not keep up with what was being sold.  Still sounds like they have issues.