Your help appreciated

Hi there. I am trying to get a friend's computer up and running for accessing the net and I have some questions I hope someone can answer.

(1). When the computer is booting up a message comes up along the lines that system.ini cannot find 'ndiswan.vxd'. How can I correct this. If this is this related to the modem, I have checked the modem in Control panel/properties etc and it says its functioning normally.

(2). My second question is that my friend has IE4 and I would like to upgrade it to IE 5.5. Do I have to do a succession of upgrades, or can I upgrade directly to 5.5

(3). My last question (sorry guys) is the HD on the computer is only 517MB with 90MB free, and I would like to know how/what files I can cull to give me more free space.

The OS is Win98 and I think its a 486 computer or thereabouts. Thaks for your help.

1) I'm not sure about this file, you could try extracting it from the windows cd to c:\windows\system, as I think it is windows related.

2) Why on earth would you want to install IE on a 486. IE4 is slow enough, I would hate to see 5.5.
Try Opera (www.opera.com), it is faster than Netscape 3 on a 486, and supports all the new standards.

3) Go back to win95, its much smaller (95a is only 30mb, 95b ~80mb) and will be much slower. A clean install will free up a lot of space.

I have been thru this on my fathers 486-100, 16mb ram, and it is a quite useable system.

Thanks bm. I will look on the Windows cd for the file in question. Yes I agree its an old computer doing a lot of work. If it was up to me it would probably be a paper weight or something, however its all my friend has and I have to work with what she's got (ie Win98 vs 95). I will check out Opera though as I hear its a lean fast browser. Thanks again.

Incase you can't tell i screwed up above:

3) Go back to win95, its much smaller (95a is only 30mb, 95b ~80mb) and will be much _FASTER_.

Hi Anton. The following Microsoft article explains how to correct the device file error message on startup.

Good Luck - Paul

http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q166/8/32.asp