I'm thinking about buying a Alienware custom system for 3000 dollars. These are the specs. PIV 1.7 384MB RDRAM GeForce 3 Hardware Pioneer DVD SBLive! X-Gamer 10/100 Ethernet Lan Harness Plus 19" Monitor, Keyboard, Opticmouse, etc. Recently however, I've heard 2 complaints: 1) Some guy ordered a $4100 Alienware. It took over a month for it to even get to the midway point of production. They told him this and that which never happend. I personally spoke to Mike J. (sales rep.) and had no problems. He went over all the ordered parts, games etc. Everything seemed crystal clear and perfect from the get-go, until I read that guy's statement. Has any 1 else had a problem like this with a Alienware order? Has anyone spoken to a sales rep who didn't know his crap? 2) I've heard about problems where Win ME starts to hog RAM automatically, and continues to do so untill the system craps out of resources, and shuts down. Has anybody else heard of this memory leak problem? Is there a patch?

As far as ME goes, you've heard correctly. I've been running ME since last August, and it's only in the last few months that any problems have cropped up. Although I have far less programs loading at startup than ever before, ME will slowly gobble up system resources till nothing works. I've tried reformatting and paring down my apps, etc, but no luck. Virus scans are negative, so I assume it's a glitch that's now beginning to surface, as I've seen many with the same problem. My thought is that it's hardware based, as many of the people I've heard with the problem have fairly new systems. I was running a Duron 650 with 128 Mb PC133, but didn't notice problems till i installed a new video card, and upgraded the ram to a full Gb with a Thunderbird 1.3.