-=> Mike Powell wrote to All <=-

 MP> First off, thanks for the replies on Win95 & USB.  After reading all of
 MP> them, I have figured out that there will most-likely be an upgrade in
 MP> that computer's future.  ;-)

 MP> Now, I have another question.  I have read a lot from people who say
 MP> that Windows ME was not really an upgrade from Windows 98SE, and that
 MP> some places even refused to sell it, etc.

 MP> Can anyone give me some actual reasons that it was a "backstep" for
 MP> Windows?  Were there any actual enhancements over Windows 98SE?

 MP> Best as I can tell, the one difference between the two is that you
 MP> cannot easily boot straight to DOS (via the F8 startup menu) if you
 MP> are having problems.  But that is from limited experience.

 MP> I am not considering an upgrade to ME.  Rather, a friend is giving me
 MP> a PC with ME already installed.  I am wondering if I should leave it
 MP> installed or not.  ;-)

 WinME got a bad reputation with so-called power users when it first came
out. In general, they were unhappy for several reasons:

-- as you've pointed out, it makes it harder to work with DOS, even though
as a Win9x family member, it continues to use DOS as its boot loader. Note
that if you're having problems, you can still boot to a DOS boot floppy--
and ME (like Win98) makes a useful emergency rescue floppy disk.

-- compared to Win98SE, it's larger and slower... addition of features like
the automatic creation of restore points take up a lot of drive space, and
more services running in the background use up RAM and CPU cycles.

-- the additional features were designed to make it more idiot-proof and to
offer additional multimedia features for beginning users: digital camera
and CD-R support, zipped file support, PC Health features, etc... Power
users tend to prefer leaner systems that they can set up to work the way
they prefer.

-- It seemed like ME was a largely unnecessary upgrade, released at a time
when Win2000 was being marketed to business users, but home users were in a
waiting period between Win98SE and the then-upcoming WinXP Home... many
people felt it was rushed out the door to provide Microsoft an OS release
to sell to home users, rather than providing any real new technology.

Despite those criticisms, I've got ME running on several systems both at
home and at my school, and it's OK. The scaled-down DOS support is much
less of a problem (for me and my school) then it might have been several
years earlier. The PC Health and multimedia features work well enough, and
faster processors, more RAM, and larger hard drives make the added bulk not
an issue.

Moreover, it includes driver support for many newer products that are not
included with Win98SE... this makes it more useful for me at my school with
some donated systems-- where Win98SE doesn't recognize the sound or video
or network cards built into the motherboard, and where it can hard to know
what models they are to download 3rd-party drivers.

So short answer-- ME is OK by me.

-- AZ
... Inet mail to: alan at zisman dot ca
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