William Bell wrote:

1) Only 7.8 GB is being used of the 40 GB available

That is a BIOS issue. Your computer is so old that the bios is only
aware of drive configurations up to 1024 tracks, 255 sides, 63 sectors
per track. That adds up to 7.84 gb as the maximum hard drive size the
BIOS can access.

Your only hope to overcome that is if there is a BIOS update for your
computer.


2) Even though I seem to shut down correctly (selecting shutdown from
the Me menu), when it reboots, I keep getting improper shutdown
detected

ME apparently had a shut-down bug that may not have been ever fixed, but
this seems to have caused a black screen and possibly the system hangs
at shutdown instead of actually shutting down.

See if the info in these 2 links are useful for your problem:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...down-correctly

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...ard-disk-error

When your system restarts and asks you to scan the drive, and for those
times you say YES and let it scan, does it ever find a problem?