I purchased the Gateway Essential 500 Pentium III back in February of this year. I needed a computer for school purposes and for work as well. I upgraded my computer to 128 MB of Ram and added a 20.3 GB hard drive, as well as a CDRW rom in addition to he original CD Rom drive.
I have been absolutely amazed at the speed of my computer for the price. I had to go into my System Configuration utility and stop a lot of unnecessary software from loading to speed up my internet access. I was very happy with the pre-loaded software and found it very helpful in most of my computer endeavors. I did however decide to upgrade to Office 2000 Professional due to my needs in Visual Basic support. I have been somewhat unhappy with the speed of my computer after loading Office 2000 to my system but have since worked out a few bugs that were present.
The Pentium III processor has been great and Intel has a lot of free goodies available to those people who own a Pentium III processor at their site!
I think this computer has a ton of great features and would stand up against many others in its price range with some extras they may not have. Gateway has been great in the support department and I am very pleased with my purchase.



Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 2,200.00
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: 401-500
RAM: 128
Internal Storage: CD-RW
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20