i have a friend who has my hand-me-down gateway pc running windows 98. she's been having problems with it. she says that she thinks zone alarm seems to be interfering with her cable modem access. we've been discussing this over the phone since she doesn't live near me. i've suggested using sygate instead.

she has tried to reformat the drive and re-install windows 98 (using both the restoration disk from gateway and the actual windows 98 disk). but she is having problems. it's hard for me to deal with this over the phone because she's not very linear-thinking (if you know what i mean) so i'm not realy sure what the underlying problem(s) is/are. only that the computer freezes up after start-up while trying to initialize the firewall.

her brother (who now lives with her) has a computer that he built a few years ago. he had purchased a copy of windows 2000 and had installed it on his computer. his computer is currently in storage, however, but his windows 2000 cd is not - he has it in his possession. he says that he bought it at a flea market - i don't have any more details. it's probably an oem disk.

they have asked me if there would be a problem with installing windows 2000 on the "98" computer she's having problems with. they are worried that they won't be able to do any of the 2000 service pack updates since it's no longer on the computer it was bought for. my understanding is that it is not until xp that windows software becomes tied to a physical machine.

am i right in this?

would they have any problems installing 2000 and downloading it's service packs and updates?

i'm aware of the different file structures (fat32 & ntfs) between the different operating systems ... and that once you go to ntfs you can't go back to fat32, correct?

i'm asking this because i think that 2000 might experience less of the problems they are having with 98.

any advice would be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.