Cant Change page permalinks?? Help!

I have 2 blogs – one uses 2.9.1 and the other 2.9.2.

With the 2.9.2 version which has just been manually installed, I cannot seem to change page urls/permalinks of pages from the ugly https://site.com/?page_id=1 to something like https://site.com/about.html .. . i think it might be something to do with htaccess – i dont have a htaccess file, nor much knowledge about that sort of thing :S

on a diff wp blog i use, which uses version 2.9.1 – i can literally just change the permalink by clicking Edit right under the page title, but with this blog using 2.9.2 i cant.. again i think it may be to do with file permissions, but not sure! any ideas?

I disabled all plugins on both to see if it made a difference, and it doesnt.