We recently purchased a new PC for the family (a fair way up the ladder from our old 486!). I have a couple of questions because we are still grappling with the new toy. The machine (Pentium 450 running Win 98 etc…) came with an Internet trial offer. We have moved to a different ISP but when we use Internet Explorer 5 the text in the window bar at the top of the window says ‘Microsoft Internet Explorer provided by XXXXXXX (the name of our first ISP). Is there any way I can change this ? It’s not a great big problem but it would be nice to ‘tidy it up’. Secondly, our machine came with a 32Mb TNT 2 AGP Video card. How do these work (what do they do) and does this piece of hardware benefit from any up dates etc.. as fair as software (i.e. can we make it work better and keep it ‘tuned’ to perform well with games etc), and if so how do I do it?

The window bar text was preinstalled on the computer when you bought it, by the ISP with whom you had the internet trial offer. This is a custom feature that can’t be transferred if you go to another ISP. The video card which you have is one of the top ones on the market. From your description, the video card has 32mb of memory on it, it is installed in your AGP bus (Accelerated Graphics Port which is specifically designed for high performance video cards). The chipset of your video card, TNT, is one of the best 3D chipsets available. 3D accelerator cards are designed to provide smooth graphics and rendering for graphic intensive games and applications. If you want to keep your graphics card up to date and ‘tuned’, the best way to do this is to download the latest drivers from the manufacture’s website for your card. You can normally find the manufacturers’ website on the side of the box, or in your case since it was preinstalled, in the utilities for your graphics card.