Need a Safety Gate

We have 2 of these gates and they are 10 years old and still work! I will say they are not the type that are taken don easily, so these are "set it and forget it" type gates: http://www.toysrus.com/product/index.jsp?productId=4319489

We have 2 staircases. One has walls, one has banisters. The one on the wall was easy. The one with banisters, we extended the gate, slid the ends between the rungs of the stair case, the zip-tied the gate to the rungs. That sucker isn't going anywhere and no drilling!

At the bottom of the stairs we had an Evenflo Soft Gate that was adjustable on the top and bottom to fit securely on our banisters. Not sure if that is how your stairs are set up or not? If you have walls on both sides a simple pressure gate will do the trick. The soft gate was expandable to a pretty wide range and folded down well making it easy to take along if needed.
At the top of your stairs I would highly recomend a mounted gate, as they are far more reliable so long as they are screwed into the studs.

We have really wide step openings so I had the ones that screwed in...we put it into our wooden banister. My child's safety was more important than our banister. And you can hardly tell where the holes were. They worked great-much better than the ones that work by force.

I would use the type that screws into the wall b/c they are much more stable and the rubber/tension ones mess up your walls too.

I'm not sure where you live but I would check out Once Upon a Child as they have used gates there. The way our house is configures we had to buy 6 gates!! Wish I had had thought about them used :)