gateway question

[Needtoknow]

Hello all,
Yes this is a computer question in the general discussion forum 'cause I really don't know where to put it.
I have never owned a prebuilt box in my 10 years of doing this.
I recently had a birthday, yay me, and at the time I had fried my Socket A 1400 and some various cards, mobo etc and was stumped. I had never had everything go at once.b I benchbuilt and troubleshot as I had learned to do here when PC Mech was a little baby website (congrats) to no avail.
So I went to my neighborhood Goodwill Computer store, a haven for parts and living here in Austin, there is always a surplus of gently used parts.
Long story short after getting my little hands on and opening 10 envelopes of parts, we got me a box running on an Athlon 2000.
Wonderful, "new" 64 meg nvidia card and my little slaved 40 gig hdd's and I was cooking with gas..Then I get a birthday present from dear old mom. It was quite unexpected, a Gateway (I shudder) a GT5238e.intel dual core processor
Gateway Desktop with Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E6300
Model: GT5238E
Featuring enhanced graphics, a 9-in-1 digital media manager and Intel® Viiv™ technology, this desktop makes it easy to manage your digital photos and MP3s as well as take on opponents in the virtual gaming realm.
* Maximize Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 so you can watch and record live TV! Check out a PC for Home Entertainment with a TV tuner built-in! (Learn more about Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005.)
* Intel® Core™2 Duo desktop processor E6300 with 2 processing cores, 1066MHz system bus, 2MB x 2MB L2 cache and 1.86GHz processor speed per core
* 1GB PC4200 DDR2 memory for multitasking power, expandable to 8GB
* Multiformat DVD±RW/CD-RW drive with double-layer support records up to 8.5GB of data or 4 hours of video using compatible DVD+R DL media

(I'm an AMD guy from my K6 days) and cannot even quite open the box...yet.

My question is are gateways all still proprietary like Dell (ugh)
and will the Windows be all screwed up like the Compaqs I've seen where nothing "works" like normal WindowXP? Where you have to go to the little Gateway place to do things that would be in "control panel" under a normal OS?

I cannot really crush my mom by refusing the gift etc, but can i reformat the hard drive or something and escape the little Gateway logo everywhere and just have a "normal" really roarin' PC compared to what I am used to driving?

I already see the dreaded "restore" disc that came with it, which has always spelled trouble i.e. reformat when anything happens according to some of the posts I have read elsewhere on the web...

As always, thanks for any and all comments/advice.

[Kareeser]

In my experience? There may be some pre-installed applications, but I haven't seen anything take over a computer like you described except Sprint's dial-up internet back in the mid-to-late 90s'

There's nothing stopping you from purchasing another copy of Windows XP to format fresh and reinstall. On the other hand, you could also just get used to the fact that your Gateway comes with bundled software. It can't be so bad, can it? It's supposed to be there to help you

Granted, that's not often the case, but there are always ways around obstacles disguised as helpful programs

[glc]

That is actually a very good computer. The onboard video is Intel GMA 3000 which is not shabby at all. It even has a PCI-Ex16 slot for a video card. You may be an AMD fan, but that E6300 will put almost anything AMD makes right now to shame.

Dells are not that proprietary these days - and neither are these things. Yes, it has preloaded software, but it's easily uninstalled. There's no proprietary interface - it looks just like XP because it *is* XP.

Open it up, fire it up, and enjoy it.

[Needtoknow]

I have it out of the box and it sure is pretty...

as I sit amid the roar of my fans on my Athlon...

[glc]

Uh huh - and that Gateway is micro-BTX which is almost totally silent.

[newbuilder14]

I'll add, the Gateway 500GR I have was the silentest PC I have ever experienced in my life.