three small installer questions?

[Karen Lewellen]

Hi all,
Nice thing about the speech not working in wheezy for me is its making me 
slow down and think through with the fortunate help of the entire manual 
what might be happening.
This test desktop is an Intel 400 Pentium II with 384 or memory, and while 
persona checked the hardware to insure it could work, cd rom, Ethernet 
card sound card and the like I have used little if any of it together 
before since it was built only for Linux and this took some time.
so, in theory, how long would it normally take for the system to reach the 
boot menu of the installer?  I may be pressing s too soon, not sure where 
the beep would come from without a speaker, or if there even is a PC 
speaker.
  Since the installer is checking on things, this might take a while.
Second, as I said above there is a network card in the machine, but I am 
between providers and dsl modems just now.  the network check seems later 
in the install process, but will I be able to bypass this test or might 
everything freeze trying to conduct it?  The installer may seek the 
network ard as hardware even before giving me the boot menu options 
perhaps?

Last of all, I am using the wheezy software speech <or trying to lol> for 
the install but as I have a dectalk express may want to change to this for 
speech once i Manage to install debian.  I do not want to try this 
before, who know the software voice might be understandable.
still will I be able to configure this  change later, once the system is 
up and running?
I did confirm looking att he cd itself that the disc is fine, the write 
image and the like.  could have a look using my dos setup in this main 
machine.
at least it is not the cd itself.
thanks,
Karen