Just finished stripping and rebuilding my Gateway. The last few months it has been having problems which I failed to realize they were as serious as theywere. Computor failed to load a few days ago and could get it to show desktop. I had updated to XP home from ME. I reloaded the ME to get the basics back in the program and then reloaded the XP update again. That created further mayhem. It got so I couldn't even get to DOS command prompt to go to C:\ formating procedure. I finally figured that if I forced an XP professional program I have onto the harddrive it might abort the original programs. It did just that because the XP professional prompted me to do that. What a way to spend the last couple fo days. Didn't want to think about a new machine this time of year.

If it causes you such grief, maybe it'd be worth your time to ask someone to come in and get your computer reformatted and installed with XP.

It seems that you used an upgrade package?? Using an upgrade package is the worst thing a person can do to a computer. If it is possible use the FULL version of XP and reinstall as it will save you problems in the future.

I have to agree with Lurch, any windows software with a "UPGRADE" causes more grief than it is worth.

Kurch and Jugstah,
I upgraded quite a while ago to Windows XP home and it started to go down hill then and their. Recently I added the Kodak program that go with the new camera and printing dock. Well considering all the megs needed on RAM for XP and the fact that the Kodak program starts and loads completely every startup that was causing my desktop to not load. You know all I got to look at was the Windows XP logo. Our resident computor professional at work and he gets paid to be one told me I had some kind of major failure in my XP program and I may havce to reformat and load up a new program, but before doing this he suggested I load the original program again. That origianl program was ME, which I loaded onot the same partition as the XP update. BOOM! Nothing work after that. Wee I ofrced the issue by attempting to load a full XP professional program, which I had to do because I could not gain access to DOS to reformat everything was so scewed up. But my theory worked. Before I was able to load the full version of XP prfessional I was prompted to dump and reformat, which I did. Guess what though, which I bet you both have figured out. All I really needed was a RAM expansion and nothing else. XP needs 80 megs just to open, and that combined with the Kodak program wich I could not shut down was my problem. So today I went to 4allMemory.com and utilized their program that survey my machine and ordered up two 256's to replace my meager two 64's. With only 128 megs currently I was crippled with either the windows update to the original ME program or the beautiful XP prof. that I loaded, which works better but will work even moreso in a few days. Thanks for the reply guys.

Windows 2000 and Windows XP are both bootable CDs, meaning you can insert your CD into the CDROM drive, reboot the computer and you should be able to install XP/2000 from there without needing to do anything else.

If that didn't work, you may need to check your CMOS/BIOS settings to ensure that it can boot off a CD.

And yeah, I like running XP on nothing less than 512MB