Please don't misunderstand, I'm not angry, nor am I ungrateful, I'm paranoid and frustrated.
For the past year I've had to learn from forums and emails how to repair my puter.
You see, when I first bought my puter, Gateway helped me every time I called, even though half the time they had no resolution for my problems, except to reformat and reinstall XP.
After about 50 or 60 calls and 8 or 9 formats, in less than a year, they replaced my hard drive thinking that was my problem and when that didn't help they told me it was Windows ME and a lack of sufficient memory that was my real problem, and they were right about that.
So, they pressured me into purchasing XP Home and two 512 memory chips from their sales dept with the promise that if I bouht it from them they would back it up as they have in the past.
I found later that I had gone in debt with them for three times what I should have paid, and although, I now had a predominantly stable system, as it quit hanging and blue screening all the time, they would no longer offer me help because I now have an operating system that did not come with my puter. They told me their rules and contract did not support an operating system upgrade.
They dropped me like a steaming turd and left me on my own and now my problems have shifted from OS problems to security problems, as in the past four months I have had to reformat and reinstall XP about 6 times, two of which were done in less than a week of each other, because I knew no other way to repair XP after a virus had screwed everything up.
I discovered these forums and have been learning and using alternatives which make reformatting a last ditch effort.
I thank all of you for your encouragement and suggestions. Gateway did me a favor, kicking me out of the nest, so to speak, and even though I feel they ripped me off big time, I believe I've benefited from my independence.
There should to be laws against what they did to me, but in retrospect they never really helped me as much as people like you have, especially after they started using foreign technicians. Some of them were pretty sharp, but I have a sneaky suspicion that most of them knew less than I do.
Thanks again, and by the way I right clicked on every single control on the program and every single item on all the context menus I could find and finally found the controls you all were talking about. I recognised them after I found them and must have happened on them when I first installed the program and just could not remember how to navigate to them. What I need is a map.
Have a Goodun,
fhurst
