CompuServe Thread

Tim, I've got a Gateway 2000 P560 and have had great success! When I purchased it late last year, the 66mhz wasn't available. It came with 16mb RAM, 520mb hard disk, 15" monitor (this supports the "green" timeout shutdown), ATI PCI AX0w/2mb, MS-DOS 6.1, MS Windows 3.1. At the time there were no other machines that could touch the price/performance of this machine. Although there might be faster brands now, I think Gateway still gives the biggest bang for the least money. As far as problems: I don't care for Gateway's "macro" keyboard, it has too many buttons that I don't use – like two sets of "F Keys". My machine's power supply quit twice so I called Gateway and they sent me another one that has been working fine. Getting a hold of Gateway on the phone can be a problem too. The 15" monitor has an anoying band that appears as a semi-transparent 1/2" strip down the left side of the tube. Gateway sent me another monitor and it does the same thing. I wanted my 16mb ram all on one simm so I could upgrade without having to swap simms. When my machine arrived I found that it had four 4meg simms. I called Gateway and was told that they were mistaken that the PCI motherboard could not address just a single simm, it needs two to work. This is a disadvantage since now I've got to trade or barter these 4meg simms when I upgrade. The simms are the 36 bit 72 pin type, so it would seem that single simm addressing should be possible with the right system board chip set. The sooner the chip set people do this the better. Aside from the montitor thing which I have decided to live with (it is only a mild distortion of the left side of the screen) the P560 has worked out and I'm happy! I have never had any problems with 3DSr3 or the dongle. As an aside: a message on this fourm claimed that the 100mhz DX4 486 rendered faster that the Pentium. The writer claimed that the DX4's math chip was faster that then Pentium. I looked into this over on the Intell Forum and get the following specs on these processors: The MFLOPS rating for the 60MHZ Pentium(TM) processor is 11.7. The rating for the 100 MHZ IntelDX4(TM) processor is 5.3. Obviously, the performance of the Pentium processor based system should be faster.