Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition

Ironically, after the install completed and machine rebooted, Windows ME greeted with the infamous "blue screen of death".

After spending a couple of hours using the diagnostic tools packaged with ME and troubleshooting the problem, I was finally able to get my system up and running.

After using ME for a couple days, here are the cold hard facts as I see them. This is a patch to 98, this is not an upgrade. It contains a lot of multimedia extras that are available from Microsoft's download site. The OS performance was not noticeably improved to me in any area. The startup process seemed faster by maybe 5 seconds tops on my 400mhz Pentium.

The price of ME hardly justifies the added functionality that a previous Win98 user gains.

I have been using this version for about a month now, and sometimes I want to uninstall it, it can really slow things down at times, and it does tend to freeze my computer an aweful lot more than previous versions. All in all, this is good for brand spanking new computers, but for older ones, I would stick with older versions, your system will just run faster.

Let me begin by letting everyone know what I am running now. I have a custom built machine, by myself. It is a Cerleron 566 overclocked to 850Mhz on an Abit Rev.II motherboard, 128mb RAM, 100 gigs of Hard drive space, Road Runner cable (not so) high speed internet access, Turtle Beach: Santa Cruz soundcard and a Matrox G200 Mystique 8mb video card.

Ok I'll put it this way, Microsoft's Windows ME does not let me use my computer to its best of performance capabilites. Win Me is slow and it looks like a direct rip off of Windows 2000. Well not that, that is a bad thing, Win 2k is at least a stable operating system that is powerful (to say the least).

Windows ME just runs about as fast as a turtle, and it is system resource hungry. I constantly have to restart whenever I do any multitasking. When there are multiple web browsers open, you can kiss half of your resources good bye. I have a lot of .dll (dynamic library link) failures when I multitask and my system just runs terrible. Once most of your memory is used up, if you dont restart... Then your internet speed will cut in half and folders take their time to open. I was also not a big fan with the networking capabilities on WIN ME. It almost looks as if Microsoft took Windows 98 ripped out have of the networking abilities and then threw WIN 2k icons on top of it, therefor creating Windows ME.

To put it nicely, I am really dissapointed with this OS. I was overall impressed with Windows 98 Second Edition and I still prefer it now. But to tell you the truth, I was really excited when I heard Microsoft was releasing WIN ME. I had a lot of high hopes that were really let down. I dont even know what went wrong, but Microsoft really screwed this one up!

I hate WIN Me and I wouldn't recomend it to anyone. But, I will let you know that there are a few good points to it and I can see how others might enjoy it. WIN ME is very easy to navigate and very user friendly. There are a bunch of new options in Windows Media Player, which I'm sure a lot of people will like (although, I dislike Media Player myself). The overall appearence to Millenium is nicer. I really enjoy the look of it, as opposed to the old 98 and 95 series. What do I mean by that? I mean the desktop and menues. It is set up a bit nicer and the new icons look more upbeat. Although they are nothing new, everything came from Windows 2000. Oh yeah, try and restart in MS DOS Mode, you can't... Because it's not there! Microsoft decided to leave DOS out of WIN ME, except for the DOS prompt inside Windows. But overall, there is just nothing in Win Me to keep me running it. It took me a month or so to make my decision to go back to WIN 98 SE on a dual boot with Mandrake Linux 7.1

My recomendations are to either stick with Windows 98 Second Edition or with Windows 2000. If you are looking for a fast OS with stability, it is best to stay away from Win ME. If you have it in ya, learn Linux... Linux is fast, powerful, stable and fun once you get into it. But do your self a favor, stay away from Microsofts newest operating system Windows ME - Millenium Edition, or try it out first to decide for yourself. I didn't care for it in the least bit. I would give it 1 star, but I know it doesn't really deserve that. Hey, at least it runs... Thats about all I could ask from it. But the truth is, WIN ME just plain sucks. There isn't much to it that I like, I would probably never go back to it and most of my friends feel the same way. Actually, just about everyone I have talked to, who hava ran Windows ME disliked it. Read what other people have wrote. Most of them dislike it too! Honestly, I'd stay away!

I hope I gave some of you a bit of information that is useful. I'm not trying to bash Microsoft because they are the industry standard, because I'm not. I just wanted to provide you all with my point of view about the way I feel and my experiences with their new program. I am awaiting the next version of WIN ME (whatever they'll call it). I'd be more than happy to run it too. Plain and simple; I didn't care for WIN ME and I wanted everyone to know where I stand =) Hope that did it for ya! And if you really want to, try it at risk!