Gateway saids max ram is 512 MB. Is there any way around this? I have flashed the BIOS. Also this system came with an AGP card. There is also onboard Video. How do i set up 2 monitors? One useing AGP and the other useing onboard? Please see this post regarding the ram.

http://www.computing.net/cgi-bin/my...

Keyboard not detected. Hit F1 to Continue. BREAKFAST.SYS HALTED Cerial port not Responding!!

Why can't the orignal post be edited? Here is the post regarding the ram. Sorry i posted the wrong link. The reason im reposting this is because ive been out of town and haven't been able to reply.

http://www.computing.net/answers/ha...

Keyboard not detected. Hit F1 to Continue. BREAKFAST.SYS HALTED Cerial port not Responding!!

If Gateway say the Max is 512 Mb then thats all you are going to get unless you want to set about redesigning the motherboard. The BIOS has little to do with it.

If the on-board video uses the AGP bus then you wont be able to install two monitors by adding a AGP card. The AGP bus can only have one device connected to it, on-board or add-on but not both.

You should be able to drive two monitors by adding a PCI graphics card as the PCI bus can be shared.

Stuart

ram: a long time ago I had a PC Chips make motherboard with a amd 500mhz cpu. It had three ram slots. The manufacturers spec clearly said max 128mb per slot, but i found it could actually take 256mb sticks (as long as they had 16 chips on) and work fine.
I know that does not mean yours can take more, but if it was mine i would try it. But i would make sure the 2 x 512mb sticks were 16 chips (8 on each side),not just 8 on one side.
But i appreciate you would not want to buy them and then find they dont work, you really need to borrow some.

"ram: a long time ago I had a PC Chips make motherboard with a amd 500mhz cpu. It had three ram slots. The manufacturers spec clearly said max 128mb per slot, but i found it could actually take 256mb sticks (as long as they had 16 chips on) and work fine."

That was common for mboards made in circa 1998-1999 or so.
I have an Epox EP-MVP3-G5, which has the last (newest) chips available for the Via MVP3 chipset, and it's manual says it can only support max 128mb of ram per slot, but I have found out since, as cliffpage has said, any Via MVP3 or MVP4 chipset will support certain 256mb modules, if and only if they have 16 chips.

At least some of the places where you can look up which ram works in your mboard know better than the original specs.
Use the Gateway model number to search for the ram for it.
E.g. some of the ones I point to here list 256mb modules for MVP3 or MVP4 chipset mboards:

See response 5 in this for some places where you can find out what will work in your mboard for sure:
http://www.computing.net/hardware/w...
Correction to that:
Mushkin www.mushkin.com

When you install a video card in a mboard that has onboard video, doing that almost always disables the onboard video, so you can't use both at once.
(The only exception to that I know of is certain very recent ATI/AMD main chipsets with onboard video have a Hybrid feature - if you install a Hybrid compatible PCI-E video card, both the onboard video and the video in the slot are enabled - that's exclusively an ATI video chipset / AMD/ATI main chipset feature.)
If you want to use two monitors -
- you need to get a video card that has two monitor output ports. You can an inexpensive one for this old system, but it may need to have 2X or 2X/4X or 2X/4X/8X compatibility, depending on what you AGP slot supports - newer video chipsets are 4X or 4X/8X only(virtually all 8X are actually 4X/8X compatible)and they won't work in AGP 2X slots, and some 4X or 4X/8X AGP slots cannot use a card that has 2X capability. E.g. an ATI 9250 chipset is 2X/4X/8X - an ATI 9600 chipset and up is 4X/8X.
- or - if you want the monitors to have identical display and ONLY that - you could get yourself a video splitter box and connect the box to your video port with a video extension cable you also get, and connect both your monitors to the box. Video splitter boxes are the same thing stores use to display the same identical display on two or more monitors.
e.g.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicat...