John:

Thanks for the information. We did put our serial number into the Gateway site and there was nothing there about SP2.

We found your statement that "Microsoft's policy that OEM installed systems must be supported by the OEM manufacturer is well known" rather interesting. While we can understand Microsoft's position on this matter, it never occurred to us to ask Gateway if it was OK to install SP2 on our machine. We consider ourselves more knowledgable than the average user of XP, so problems like this must have occurred a lot of times (according to Microsoft there have been 175 million installations of SP2). It would seem that it would not be too difficult for Microsoft to make this more clear.

What we are wondering is: How many people reading this knew that they had to consult their computer manufacurer before installing SP2 or, for that matter, any windows update?

Bev and Jerry