Yes, I have a Gateway 300SE that I am working on for a customer. She wants SP2 cause of a device that has to have it to be updated, and she needs it anyway cause I said so.

My problem is that SP2 will reboot after installation. I want to give her a ligament answer as to why she can't have SP2. I am thinking the BIOS just doesn't support it. The latest one I found off of Gateway was back in 2002 when the PC came out. It works fine without the installation of SP2, but soon has you install and reboot, the system never goes into windows.

I have also ran the fix from MS that updates the update.sys file to the newer version and it still will not work.

Is it possible that SP2 just does not work on older units? Or better yet, what's the fix?

No way. It will work. Maybe her install is screwed. I have used SP2 on ancient pcs no problem. A fresh install of course.

The hard way - it will take hours if not days to fix it. At boot, tap F8, select "disable auto restarting...", reboot pc, if it blue screens, note the 0x000000?? & offending program name, google them.

The easy way - boot up a live Windows or stick her harddisk in your pc, back up her stuff, do a clean windows install and SP2.

SP2 is known not to install nicely on unclean machines(machines that have traces of spyware/malware/viruses...

i would run spybot search and destroy, AVG or AVAST, spyware blaster, and then try SP2.

Ditto on Flakes

And if you have a WinXP installation disk w SP2 already on it, an OP/SYS Repair Installation may solve the situation and not lose any of her files.

Do you know how to do a Repair Installation?

If not run the WinXP installation like you're installing from scratch, at the screen after the F8 agreement, press R, and when prompted Re-Enter the product key code for the machine, and when it completes all her files will still be there.

Plus you can always slipstream SP2 on a SP1 XP installation disk, if thats all you have, but thats a different subject altogether.

Important Note: As Flakes mentioned check and clean the machine first, a Repair Installation only Repairs the Windows Operating System Files, if you have problems elsewhere in some of her other software, it will still be there after the Repair Installation!