Gateway system headache!!

A friend of mine wanted me to see if I could speed up his system. He has a gateway running xp home edition with 256 mb of ddr ram with a 1.6 cpu. I did the usual things (defrag, startfolder cleanup, virus check, etc.) but I was unable to change it abit. I tried to get in and check the bios settings but gateway seems to have removed access to it during startup. Is there any other way to check the settings or does he have to have gateway do the work. Any help would be appreciated.