Swap your hard drives to install IE 4

Question: I have a problem with installing Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 on my Pentium 133 with 16 megs of RAM. The reason is I don’t have any more space on my 120 Mb “C” drive. However, my “D” drive has well over 1 Gig left on it. I tried to install it onto my D drive, but it said that it needed more space on my “C” drive for the installation. I think it wants to create a temporary drive on it. I was wondering if there was some way I could tell IE4 to make the temp directory on my D drive and to install it on my D drive. What do you suggest? —G.W.

Answer: There’s a simple solution to your problem: Swap your drives. Make C: drive D:. I know it’s a hassle, but you’re going to run into this problem time and time again.

Part of the problem is that Internet Explorer 4.0 needs at least 51 megabytes of room to install its minimum configuration. The full installation requires 80 megabytes of hard-drive space.

During set-up, disk space requirements increase because the swap file grows. A swap file is temporary area on your hard drive used when your computer’s Random Access Memory (“RAM”) has filled up. It’s a kind of overflow reservoir for data. On a computer with 32 megs of RAM, the swap file may grow by 11 megs. This increases the total disk-space requirements to 62 megs of hard-drive space on a minimum install or 91 megs for a full installation.

Because your computer has 16 megs of RAM, the swap file may grow larger than 11 megs.

Of course that’s still not enough because after installation, you’ll need space for your internet cache files.

A general rule, explained in the Frequently Asked Questions file at Microsoft’s support website at microsoft.com support, is to have at least 100 meg or 10 per cent (whichever is smaller) of your primary hard disk free at all times.

The reason IE 4.0 won’t allow you to install it on an alternate drive is because it replaces a series of Windows 95 files.