I feel like I have been had. Please tell me i am not.

I haven’t been able to try everything yet but I do need to wait now for the Windows update to Explorer 9 to finish before I can do anything.
Thank you Stormy13 for the detailed instructions for the BIOS update; they should help tremendously. One brief question should the instructions work for both the dell and the Gateway?
I will be starting with the Gateway. I have two repair bays or maybe I should call them work decks in my work area that I can hook up at the same time and I prefer to have one of them occupied with a stable computer for correspondence and research during the build and upgrade process on the ailing computer-patient
Btitton30, do you think that there may be a program that is preventing the BIOS update because I did a fresh install; only things on the computer now is Adobe reader, and whatever was installed by Win 7. And its upgrades. I have to take that back I also installed Office 2010 professional and all of its updates. I also had to install the drivers for the add-in Graphics card but they Came straight from the NVIDIA homesite and the were specific for the Win 7 64-Bit version.
As to your question did win advisor say everything would work? Oh no a lot of different programs I think I had Office 2000 professional and it did not like any of that…… some printers and a number of other things but none of that stuff is on the computer. that is one of the reasons I put out the cash for Office 2010 and the new HP Officejet Pro 8500 printer.

I followed the directions for the BIOS update. To the letter by following the directions thatStormy13 supplied and let me say that they were the correct directions because the read me file that came with the download file said the same thing; and it got all the way to the Intel BIOS update-program (Big Blue screen) What is it with Intel and there Blue screens? Anyway it wasn’t the blue screen of death it was the BIOS update program and I thought wow we are getting somewhere but to my disappointment a popup screen said “This program is unable to continue, Internal system Error; There is a program or internal problem”
Then I read the instructions again and it did tell what the BIOS update was supposed to address and that was to correct possible black screen issues and also bad hard disk error messages nothing other than that. And even though this is the update they provided right from their support page for my specific Model number below this was a list of Gateway computers that it was applicable to and my model number was not listed