Windows NT 4.0 sp6

I have a dell computer 166 MHz. I am not an expert, but I want to learn more because is a very important tool. I got this computer, because a friend gave it to me. It came with this operational system. I have it at home. How good is it? Why sometimes when I try to run a program, it says that my System can't support it?
What does a browser means?
What is IE?
What does it mean, that my system is running low on virtual memory?
What is a Path? Sometimes I need to open a program and appear a window with different programs, and I don’t know which one to use. There are some extensions in this programs like .tag, .dat, .icon, .ezg, .ctl , can you tell me the meaning of this extensions and how can I open them?
My computer is slow , I thing because I don’t know how to clean it ( how to take off or out all the files that I don’t need), can you explain what can I do?

 

Welcome to TSG and to computing in general.

You have much to learn and you are lucky to be able to learn on a free machine! NT4 with sp6 is a good OS, but not very friendly to a novice. It is fairly stable and with your hardware, you probably won't be able to upgrade to W2000 and definately not to XP. Be sure to buy an Anti-Virus program such as Symantec's Norton AV or McAfee. Browsing is two-fold, meaning to search the local network for other machines (probably not what you need to know for a home PC) and Internet browsing. IE is Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and is the most widely used, with Netscape a close second. Some sites work better with one or the other, but most sites work well with either.

Virtual memory is the process of the system using disk space as memory for programs that require more memory than the physical RAM. The usual formula for sizing the virtual memory is 2 1/2 time RAM (128MB RAM, approx. 300MB Virtual, also called a page file). You can look under the Help menu of explorer to search for haw to set in NT4 (sorry, I have forgotten the exact method).

To clean up the disk of unneeded files, you will need to first try removing programs that you don't need or recognize as useful. If you have questions, post back. To remove programs, click on Start > Settings > Control Panel, when the control panel window opens, click on Add-Remove Programs and scroll down the list of installed programs. Click on the ones to remove and follow the instructions. You will probably want to to then defragment the disk. Fragmentation is when the parts of a file get seperated physically on the disk and therefore take a longer time to open as the system has to find all the parts. There are free defragmentors available on the web, use google.com to search for one.

That should get you started. Have fun!