New
#11
Taking your questions in order
1) The 'Get new featues....' offer is a lead-in to offering an Anytime Upgrade to a higher edition - not a service pack.
2)I dislike FireFox - it requires way too many add-ins to be a useful browser, and they all have their foibles. I usually use IE or Chrome. As far as I know it doesn't use .NET at all.
3) New HD - open Disk Management (diskmgmt.msc) and find the disk there - right-click on it and select Initialize, then partition and format it, and assign a drive letter.