I have a Gateway 1.8 ghz, 256 RAM, 80 gig, and whatever video card came with the computer i dont know. Will Flight Simulator 2002 run well or is it going to be crappy.

It should be OK CPU-wise, but the vidcard is important.

You should be in good shape. Check the video card - make sure it's at least a GeForce2 or an ATI Radeon 8500. You would benefit from upgrading your ram to 512MB. RAM is roughly the price of toilet paper - so there's really no excuse not to upgrade and FS will benefit by leaps and bounds if you go from 256 to 512.J

You should find out what your video card is. That is what will make the difference on your system.If its onboard video dont expect it to run exceptianally well. For the most part the onboard video is a lesse performer.To find out what video card you have find your Device Manager(use windows help if you dont know where it is)Now look for display adapters, double click on it and it should show you what video card you have.Come post the results, im sure people will be able to give you a good judgement as soon as you do that.

Bet a dollar to a donut that you have ONE huge 80 Gig HD with no partitions.Would be wise to partition it with about 3 GB on "C" drive for OSand at least a 5GB partition for FS2002.Image your "C" drive so that if you get into trouble and can't figure out what gremlin is working in your computer you can restore your "C" drive.I am using PartitionMagic 8.0 , you can partition on the fly without having to format your HD and lose what is on there.Of course Gateway has already loaded your "C" drive up with a lot of garbage that you will probably never use, you can delete anything that you don't want before you image the drive.

"Image your "C" drive so that if you get into trouble and can't figure out what gremlin is working in your computer you can restore your "C" drive."Very good advice. Isolating the O/S from applications makes more and more sense, especially with a fairly constant influx of driver updates, etc.... On my WAN, we no longer fight over an iffy machine. We reimage it, with little or no disruption to the user due to our isolation of the apps vs. the O/S....