Odd LAN question

Dear Masters of the Intarwebs, who are superior to myself in knowledge:

Please help me. We recently moved from a house stuck in the stone-age, with ...CORDED phones, dial-up internet, and a Win98 hunk of crap we call a computer. So, i pushed and pushed for some changes, and, well, atleast i got better internet. So, we gots a DSL connection now, and, of course, the guy that came to set it up came when i was gone, and talked to my mom. So, she of course has no idea what to do, and i just decided to wing it.

I took some ethernet cable, and popped it in our modem, and MY nic (they didn't provide one... cheap intarweb people). I went to (remember, i have 98 ) tools>internet options>connections in internet explorer, and then ran the *setup internet connection wizard* thingy. I selected set up lan or whatever, said autodetect proxy server, and when i went to the next step, it said i should use "berea.edu" (berea is where i moved from) in port 8080.

I finished the wizard, and tried to run IE. And guess what it did: NOTHING. so i hit refresh, and agian nothing. so, i tried firefox, and it worked. So, i haven't really addressed the problem for a week now, but i was wondering: why won't my IE work, and am i sending data from here (georgia) to berea, and then back there to georgia? whats going on?!

I don't use IE very much, i like firefox alot better. however, i wanna run internet update, and i can't. my IE doesn't work. now, it was having trouble before. whenever internet update would run, it would be "checking for updates," and then it would tell me that i couldn't interface with the motherbrain of microsoft because my time was wrong, or something like that. of course, my time was correct, so i kinda got curious and ran virus scans and what not.

so, basically, i want someone to tell me if my connection is setup wrong, and/or to tell me that i don't really need to run internet update, and IE can just die. or whatever the situation may be. if anyone could offer any help, it would be greatly appreciated.

thanks

thank you VERY much. i tried to connect by ip, and it didn't work. so, i took off the proxy setting, and it works now. i'm happy. i would just stay on firefox the whole time, but i can't do some things with it that IE can. so, thank you very much. but, because i took of the proxy, am i at any more risk than before? i have no firewall. is there one that you could recommend to me?

thank you FredWeston. i'll give that a whirl. do you have any recommendations for [free] win 98 compatible firewalls?

awwww...... booo. yeah, i have a win xp disk coming from one of my friends, i'm just not sure how well this compy will handle it. its almost 10 yrs. old, with a 380 mhz processor, and 120 megs of ram. xp specs tell me it'll run, i'm just still worried about it. but, oh well. doesn't xp have a built-in firewall, too? oh... wait... correction.... doesn't xp have a *troubled* built-in firewall, too?

no no no no no, legal copy. he just got like a deal on it from his mom's boyfriend's work.... damn, in retrospect, that sounds like one lame excuse... but its the TRUTH! so xp isn't worth it? thats what i thought, but when i looked up the minimum specs, i almost thought it would work decently. so 2000 is a better way to go, you say?

thank you very much, corksil. believe it or not, that xp disk is but a single step in a very long, overly drawn out process which will eventually lead to me building myself a computer.

y'see, ever since i was like 10, i've wanted a laptop of my very own. and, pointless personal history blurbs aside, i've been saving up for like a year and a half for my very own computer. however, stagnant incomes and setbacks in the form of expensive girlfriends have punched holes in my funds. so, yeah, i'm gonna upgrade.

i don't wanna do a tigerdirect deal, i'm gonna go c2d (prolly e6300), a *decently priced* mobo that i like (one of which i have yet to see for c2d), a decent gpu (7800 or something, depending on whether or not dx10 is out when i've got the moolah), 2 gig ram, and i'ma gonna recycle old parts.

i've been researching long and hard so i don't flub up, so i've got some good general computer knowledge, but i've yet to foray into heavy intarweb research. alls i know is that its a beautiful thing, and i vaguely how it works. so, thanks for that description. and, sorry for writing so much.