Not to argue over the unknown, but I can say from memory support for W98SE was dropped last year, six+ years after W-Whatever, forget its name, and six years after w2K. I don't expect them to drop XP any time soon. I just looked up information on the Dell C521 we purchased in December of 2006, it was under $600 before tax, so less than the subject Gateway of this thread. This Dell had the AMD 64 and 1 GByte of memory, but a much smaller HDD than the subject Gateway. It also has the 5 slot memory card input and a 17" LCD, so that says to me the Gateway price isn't particularly low. And speaking of our Dell and Vista, the Dell came with a "free" upgrade to Vista that had to be exercised by March 31. So, to be safe, and to pay only $10 S&H, I ordered our free upgrade to Vista Premium. I will not be in any hurry to implement it, and will have to see if it comes with a activation time requirement. The only statement this makes to me about upcoming Microsoft policy for XP is they want to get people on Vista so that it will be easier to provide support and to drop XP. Given what I paid for the Dell I can safely assume Dell paid the OEM for Vista and MS give them the XP Media to use until Vista (late as usual for MS) was available. Speaking of MS making money, a neighbor told me today (I have no proof, other than it sounds like the action of those who are paid way TOO much), the number 2 an MS, I forget his name, just had the largest private yacht in the world built for him, $400 million, don't remember the length but think it is several hundred feet, a crew of 65 (suppose some of them are off while others are on duty, not all on the ship at the same time), and an operating cost of 20 Million. So, MS clearly has to worry about making money off the Vista right away otherwise the top officers will not be able to buy a fleet of yachts next year.

My toshiba battery stays in full time even while on ac power which it is almost 24/7... only use battery power maybe an hour, three times per week. Battery, even though installed, does not receive any charge until it dips below 95%. Battery is located in a cooler area of the laptop so I don't think its getting any appreciable heat. Actually nothing gets appreciable heat excpt my right judo chopper ... that edge of the laptop is the only place I can feel any heat and only occasionally, so probably somthing is working hard when I feel it. Probably about every other month the laptop will run on the battery to discharge it down to around 10% charge level to exercise it, which I think the manual tells you to do - and then it only takes slightly more than 2 hrs to fully charge it. fwiw.. I used to get the daily local newspaper delivered,, I forget, not cheap. But maybe just throwing it out was the main Pia. I still read the same newspaper online, and dont have to worry about throwing the trees the pages are made of away. Nor paying for them. Plus I read lots of other news online. Research my neighors hypocrondiacisim and meds, as well as most everything I buy. I'm supposed to be on a sodium controlled diet, hospital gal told me to try to keep sodium intake around 2000mg per day - if I cheat, she said, with a sub or pizza I can always make up for it by eating nothing but ice cream the next day or two because its no to very low sodium ... How much sodium is in a domino's supreme pizza... wow, thats online - I eat a lot of ice cream. What's on tv,,, go to NASCAR.com, sPEEDTV.com, or yahoo tv guide. Wonder if walgreens has bowls, I keep breaking bowls.. hey thats online... 2 for $1.50 (they used to be 50¢ ea.) I hate shopping store to store, much easier to look online first. That's how I bought my laptop, my tv, search at Staples, OfficeDepot, BestBuy, CircuitCity,, and search online to see if any significant price at an etailer difference. If you can edit video on your desktop, you really dont need anything fancy in a laptop to surf the net or read pdf' files, or do light graphics. I have an old desktop with a decent video card and can edit or do anything on that computer. While its really nice to have a fast everything in a lsptop,,, I really dont need fast video/fast processing on my laptop,, I'm cheap, but that still is a waste of money to me... those type of programs that really need fast video processing or lots of processor power I can still run on any laptop remotely from the desktop,, and it may be a little sluggish - If it is I need to feel fast I can always take over and run the complete desktop remotely with the laptop. Not a big deal here, except I have to go power on the desktop, cause I'm cheap and dont want to leave it running full time and pay its power bill of 130watts x 24hrs when its doing nothing but sitting idle on standby.

as we mentioned belarc will tell you exactly how many slots are on the pc for ram and will tell if there are any open slots and what is in each slot so that you can determine what ram to get, and the distinct type of ram you need. I have to say 512 is still very low ram in today's standards, you might see a little improvement of course going from what you have now to 512 but knowing that you can not expand past that is your answer to the original question, to run much more than the operating system you have with sp3 and security programs and your usual programs you just don't have the ability to add the ram you would need to further grow that along with it being a celeron, is very limiting. Use it as is with your added ram for as long as you like but I sure would not be adding any additional programs to it and if you can eliminate any from it or change to ones that are less bloated and memory hogs that will help too. what antivirus programs are you running on it? definitely follow my links I gave you before and clean it out inside and out, go through your start up menu and whittle it down as much as possible and clean out excess baggage programs.

My usage is probably similar to yours Nancy. 95% of the time I spend on this computer is spent browsing the Internet, checking email, shopping, and researching. I don't play games except Mahjongg, which is not cpu intensive. This computer does have a quad core but it just happened to be the cheapest on the shelf when I walked into the store to buy one. At the time, I was too impatient to shop around. It fits my needs fine though. It's an Acer with a 3.1 GHz 32 bit AMD Athlon(tm) II X4 645 Processor, 4 gig ram and a 1 terabyte drive. It cost about $399(?) at Walmart without monitor. My other desktop is used as a personal server. Using a high-def TV as a monitor, its time is spent mostly streaming videos from the net and playing my old TV/movie collection. It also runs a web server but it's mostly for my own light use. Such as serving video to my bedroom netbook-TV setup. It also serves a single public Shoutcast stream. It's an old(?) Compaq with a 2600 MHz 64 bit AMD Athlon(tm) Processor LE-1640. It does fine for what it's used for. I suspect my bottleneck is my ISP so even though I run a cheaper computer, I pay for the fastest connection I can afford. Personally, if I were looking to buy another right now, I'd probably be tempted by something similar to this. Not necessary that one but something along that line.