computer question

[coriolis]

someone gave me a crippled computer and I'm trying to bring it back to life. It's a gateway with a P3 833 mhz processor and it came with windows ME. The owner had installed a "net nanny" type of software and lost the password. So the computer was useless for the internet, and there was no easy way to uninstall the program. The owner didn't have the recovery disk.

I took the hard drive out and put it in another tower which had the recovery disk. I ran the disk and reinstalled windows from that machine onto the hard drive. I put the hard drive back into the original machine and booted it up. It got stuck during boot up with a message that it couldn't find the Intel 82801AA SMBUS Controller. I figured that it is a driver for the system. Its funny that the machine will boot into safe mode and it works fine within the limitations of safe mode. But a regular boot always gets stuck with that message.

I poked around the Intel site and found something to the effect that the system couldn't find the appropriate WIN.INF files, but they should exist on the chipset. I downloaded a little .exe file that is supposed to set it straight. But the readme is about 20 pages of dense instructions and computerese that I would struggle with.

Could I just buy a Windows XP upgrade at walmart and run that? Would it have the necessary drivers to set this straight?

Anybody?

[mf_dolphin]

There's a good chance the a Windows XP upgrade would have most of the drivers for the PC and is a far better choice than Windows ME. Any remaining driver you could download directly from Gateway.