Newbie Questions

["Stephen Granger" <rhopi@bellsouth.net>]

My wife came home with a IIe from school, and we have some questions...

1a) Do I need a system disk to start a IIe?  If I turn the thing on w/o a
disk in the drive, the drive keeps spinning.  I remember the "old" computers
(commodore, atari, etc) used to start BASIC automatically.  Since this IIe
doesn't, can I assume its broken?

1b) if I need a system disk, where do I get one?  How about a comm program
to download stuff from the internet?  (There's lots of educational software
out there my wife can use at school...)

2a) When I do the self test, it says " *RAM 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0".  The computer
has an expansion card in it - looks like 8 ram chips.  When I pull it out,
everything is fine.  Do I need this expansion card?

2b) is a memory error a bad thing?  My wife has MECC disks up the wazoo, but
has never experienced a problem.

Thanks - Steve