4 in 1 Drivers and Windows Millenium

[Crozy]

Hi There!

I'm just curious if the drivers we are using now will work with Windows Millenium when it is released or will we have to wait for "compatible" drivers to be released?


Thanks for your thoughts,


Crozy.

 

[biohazard2]

saw a system running it (stupid room mate asked someone else to upgrade his computer while I'm on vacation, and gets a beta version). Sucks horribly, like an unstable version of win2k, and for some strange reason is only version 4.9, where as win2k is 5.0... not sure why you would want to do this. It's also VERY unstable but I do believe that that's part of the "upgrade" that was done.

Original config built by me:
PII 333
128mb pc100
gigabyte at style BX
8mb ATI
4.3gb quantum
32x toshiba
3com nic
3com 56k (not winmodem)
win98SE

What's in there now:
Celeron 333a
128mb pc66
some no brand EX mobo
2mb pci matrox
same hdd
32x cyber drive
generic nic
cheezy assed winmodem
windows ME

So stability may NOT be a result of windows ME, also more than half of his drivers are no good in ME... flaming mess.

PS the person who did the "upgade" is getting a visit from my room mate and myself tonight to figure out what happened to the computer, get the right parts back, and rebuild the thing MY WAY

 

[DrWermit]

Crozy, I am installing ME this weekend for testing with the VIA 133A chipset. My intention was to install ME and then the latest drivers for everything. I will let you know how things go. By the way I read on Voodoo Extreme that the release date for ME is early/mid September.

 

[DrWermit]

Well after spending too many hours with W'ME Beta3 this weekend I can only agree with biohazard2's comments. I won't go into a full review here but I was very disappointed with the number of software titles (mostly utilities) that refused to run. These are titles that I purchased during the past few months and there is no way I am going to buy them again if upgrades aren't available from the publishers. As far as video cards are concerned, the Voodoo 2 SLI setup and ME just did not get on - blank screens etc. - and the ATI Rage Pro menu bar refused to appear on the Desktop. Transferring files thru high speed ethernet cards was a disaster. They took an age and compressed files were often corrupted. I should point out that whenever we tested another video card we reinstalled ME, we also used two different computers. I realize that this is not just the fault of ME and that many of the drivers we used that are excluded from the final Beta version are obviously incompatible. Someone recently said in another post that the best thing to do is use W'98 SE until W'ME SE is released....I will do just that unless major improvements are made in the final release.
PS. I will give ME a go with the Voodoo 3000 when it is delivered next week just out of interest. Then it's reformat time....again!

 

[Elric]

Does anyone know how to check if DX is working properly in WinME? I installed it last nite, and it didn't like me trying to add DX7a to it, even tho the Control Panel App says just version 7 (says the one on there is newer version than my DX7a). I am questioning the DX stability/compatibility b/c I cannot get past the DirectDraw video test portion of Diablo2 setup, therefore cannot play it on WinME so far.

 

[KarsinTheHutt]

At work I did some testing on a ME final release. The 98SE drivers on that system's Matrox G400 worked fine.

I have not tried ME on my computer at home though.

 

[DrWermit]

Elric I had exactly the same problem but could find no solution I'm afraid. The more I look at ME the more I think it is really just an upgrade to W'98. I cannot agree, after looking at the Beta3 release, with the computer press that say it is worth spending around $100 on a copy. But the final release will hopefully be a big improvement on Beta3 and I'll be joining the rest of you at midnight, one day in September at CompUSA! Just joking!

 

[nemouk]

Im not that impressed with WinME to be honest, i tried a "full version" instead of the RC-1 CD i recieved and it is not much better.

It speeds along to begin with, but after you install a few programs you get the usual IE illegal operations, or the equivilent box with yellow icon. Having being forced to downgrade from win2k becuase of my SBLive! im not overly impressed with WinME. But if i had upgraded from 98 to this OS i would probably be more positive.

Good things however are:

The quick boot time, 17 seconds on my networked machine.

Faster online gaming, i think i read about new "TCPIP stacking" or something that i know nothing about .

Doesn't require as many restarts as 98, but becuase of "illegal operations" i am forced to restart anyway.

 

[Elric]

I finally got my Win98SE system to work with DiabloII again after installing the 1.02 patch. I think just for the heck of it, I'll install the beta of DX8 on the ME HDD and see what happens. If there is anything interesting to note, I'll post it for you all...

 

[mckeller]

I am running WinMe Final on a P3V4X w/ v4.23 from Via. I must say that it is rock stable. Going to do a bunch of testing just to see how stable it really is. So far I am very impressed.

 

[DrWermit]

Mckeller, pleased to hear it. One more thing we discovered with Beta3. If you have a second hard disk drive which was working with W'98 it is not recognised when ME is installed. Reinstall W'98 and it appears again! Very strange.

 

[ZoSo]

Running rock stable here with them.

 

[mckeller]

Did a lot of testing this past week and this is what I have found out.
UT and Q3 run about the same, just a couple fps faster. 3D Mark benches about 100pts faster. I did have vx errors on some games and apps, but I think it is due to the game or app(NBA Live 2000, norton firewall, and security). I eventually went back to 98se and just updated and upgraded it to ME standards. I have tweaked 98se and it boots just as fast, if not faster, and I am very impressed with the performance of 98se. I think I will stick with it unless there is some great advantage of ME.

One more thing, I have noticed if I only have these errors if I do a fresh install of ME. If I install over 98se everything works ok and no errors. ??????

 

[AMB]

I just use 4.23

 

[Dan]

I just upgraded two days ago from 98SE to a final version of ME on a VIA MVP3 chipset & K6-III/450 CPU. I'm having some problems during the bootup. The system will sometimes hang -- everything's in the system tray but there are no icons on the desktop. C-A-D tells me that "explorer is not responding."

I suspect the cause may be a software conflict than hardware conflict. When I first installed ME my firewall (BlackIce) wouldn't load. I upgraded that as well but I think it's still the source of the conflict.

 

[DrWermit]

Dan I think your right. In our tests we experenced problems with WinProxy when it was used as a firewall. Another program which refused to function was GoBack! which is very important when you are testing different drivers etc. - takes the hard drive back to a point in time as though nothing had changed.