Morrowind, blast from the past, yeah Options

[unitself]

Have any of you played and/or finished Morrowind?
I bought it years ago, never got very far, got frustrated and put it away. Well, I took it out over the weekend and made a new character and started over. I am only a few hours into it so I have only completed a few Fighter's Guild quests. I am on "Find me a Code Book" quest for them right now.
Basically, does anyone have any pointers?
1) Is there a good way to spend money on weapons and armour? Does a weapon type have an advantage over another?
2) Is there a way that I can find out what herbs and animal parts do what? For example - What is Rat Meat useful for or what does Moon Sugar do? And how does my character find out?
3) Is it better do join a guild and do all of their quests, then join another guild and then do all of thier quests, repeat, repeat... or roam around and pick up quests along my travels? I am curious because during my last game, I FREQUENTLY got caught by much stronger opponents when I just roamed the roads.

Anyways... any tips?

[Crushinator]

If you're playing the original version of Morrowing on Xbox, unfortunately there are a lot of bugs in it where you will freeze up or get a disc read error, sometimes for no apparent reason at all. It happened to me a lot in the past, and my only advice is to save early, save often. Every time you get a new quest, save, when you complete a part of the objective, save, when you complete it, save, before you enter a dungeon, save!

Don't be afraid to make a bazillion new saves either, you'll never run outta room on the HDD. I think at one point i had like 80,000 blocks of morrowind saves and it still said "50,000+ free" in the dashboard.

I'd also like to note that on my new game on the GOTY edition I haven't had a SINGLE crash/freeze/DRE, so if you can pick it up, I'd highly recommend it. All your old saves are fully compatible with the new version, too, so you can pick up right where you're at.

Regarding the person you're looking for, did you ask the original quest giver every possible blue word associated with the quest, including the name of the person and their location? If you don't ask all the questions to the original quest NPC, sometimes they won't show up as conversation topics with other NPCs, and it won't show any relevant info in your logbook.