my girlfriends mother was sold a cpu 2 years ago. it apparently needed some repair and when returned ran poorly. I took a look and was shocked that they paid over $800.00 for: Gateway x86 Family 6 Model 1 8 Stepping 3 63MB RAM Win98 2nd ED Takes about 6 min to boot up, 2 min to open folder, most files put it into coma. Should they complain to Gateway?

On what grounds? If there was something wrong two years ago, why wasn't something done about it then. Two years later that fact that it runs slow could have a multitude of reason, non of which has anything to do with Gateway. Without knowing the type and speed of the CPU, it is impossible to say if that is the problem. Could be that it is just full of junk, spy-ware. The HDD may need degraging. 63Mb is adequate for Windows 98. Stuart

I must say I agree with Stuart on this. An awful lot of rubbish can be in there slowing it down after two years. What I would do is save what you need and then defrag the HDD and re-install the OS. Then get back to us to see if it is running quicker. A few more details about the sys would also be helpful. Try the defrag and re-install first and let us know what happens, that way more options could be avaiable. AMD64Bit 3800+ Socket 939 WinXP Pro. Nvidia:6800GT Dane Electronic Pro. Dual 1024MB 400MHz RAM Tagan 480Watt PSU: 28Amps on +12volt rail. Asus A8V Deluxe "WiFi" M/Board - AquaGate

Buy a stick of 256 or 512 meg ram. Then. (And I guess you got cd's to restore the machine WITH the machine, back up your inportant documents to a cd or floppies (lots of them if you have no cd burner) and do a factory restore. 64 meg of ram is a ridiculously small amount of ram and you will obviously be thrashign your hard drive because it is demanding virtual memory as well as files. The memory upgrade will DRAMATICALLY change your pc's performance. 64 meg... I ask ya!

Run the spyware/adware programs, scandisk, defrag and maybe memory upgrade. Go to Crucial.com to determine what type and how much memory this computer can accept. By the way, around here a CPU is the processor, not the case. That is the terminology used at Bestbuy, etc.

That is the terminology used at Bestbuy, etc. BB's Geek Squad :-) i_XpUser