funny you have a gateway laptop too, I have a refurbished one that does the same thing - I got tired of redoing /re installing windows XP pro on it, so I now have a Linux OS on it.

I think mine has a faulty hard drive with some bad sectors, and I mainly using it a spare when the guys are on the desktop. So no important info is on it if hard drive finally does croak.

The Linux OS loads up a lot faster and is quicker to reinstall if I need to do that.
But sometimes I have to reboot it quite a few times before it will actually open to the log on page.

So you might look into the hard drive, and see if you can scan if for errors

info-
http://www.google.com/#sclient=psy&h...fd2b5286cafcf7