I'm contemplating the unthinkable - WinME!!!

[Adrian Tung]

I'm currently quite happy with Win2K but there's just this one minor thingie - getting AC3 on my SB Live 5.1 to work in PowerDVD 3.0. And also Unreal Tournament will be much faster, without the choppiness that I am experiencing in Win2K.

I know Win98SE is a better alternative to WinME, but here's another quirk: shutdown problems, and my PC refusing to wake up after entering Suspend. Also there's no Hibernate in Win98SE.

So... if you were I, would you do it? I'm still thinking hard if I want to really leave Win2K... it's been so stable and so painless for me.


atwl

 

[Byrd2a]

I upgraded to WinME from Win98 SE about 2 weeks ago and have been very pleased so far. Me is much better for system resources and freeing up ram after shutting down apps. The TCP/IP stack in Me is also greatly improved. If you do go to ME I suggest a clean install. I first installed over my old Win98 SE just to see if I had any hardware conflicts with ME. I did not have any hardware conflicts, however, I did have some system software conflicts resulting in error messages and missing file messages. After I wiped my drive and did the clean install, everything is up and running like a champ. Good Luck.

T-Bird 750mhz/A7V/256mb PC-133/ASUS V6600/Maxtor 15GB/CDROM/HP CD-RW

 

[Witor]

I've had no problems with WinMe, at home or work.

having said that, in all cases when upgrading from W98 to Me, I backed up all information and formatted the machines. Have had no major problems.

 

[pugh]

WIN ME has worked fine ,i have had it for about a month now

 

[Zeppy]

I know most seem to hate it, but I run 2k at work and ME at home and ME is fantastic. 2000 is outstanding for buisness applications and such but not too good for games. If you have a good install of your OS currently, you should do fine with ME. I've installed it numerous times and never ran into any problems.

 

[TonyT]

Personally, I like Windows ME. I've been running it for almost a month and have had no problems whatsoever. It's stable (haven't had a single hard crash), releases RAM far better than 98 ever did, and supports games better than 2k. Overall, I recommend it (unless you need superior stability and security, in which case stick with 2k).

 

[goophie]

Another thumbs up for win ME, i guess i've been lucky that i haven't encountered problems with it yet.

But i'd still go with win2k, the only thing that kept me back was my Aureal Vortex2 card, which win2k has bad bad drivers. But now i changed to a sb live! i'm living the good crash-free life in win2k.

But then again i'm not a die-hard gamer nor do i play dvd's...

 

[rojay]

Okay, I've been using WinME since September. And to be honest, there are some really nice things about it. System Restore (the registry backup) has saved my butt from a reformat twice now. And in terms of uptime when you aren't doing too much, it's great. But I have a few bones to pick with it as well . . . if I'm doing a lot of multitasking, it feels like I have more problems in WinMe than I did in 98SE. A lot of programs simply won't run well in it. You have to make sure you have the absolute newest drivers for stuff . . . any 98 carry-overs have, in my experience, performed worse in WinME. That is, if they worked at all. I have an ATI Rage Fury in that rig right now and I have trouble switching the drivers in it . . . keeps jerking me around. And I can't for the life of me understand why it took Logitech a few months to come out with WinME drivers (which, after I installed them, raped my computer . . . it was great, when I finally got stuff working again, Windows suddenly remembered that I really do have parallel and serial ports on my computer, grr . . .)

Basically, the nice bits don't make up for the little quirks. Wait for the first service pack or go back to 98SE. Hope this helps!

 

[javathehut]

dont do it, you'll really regret it!

 

[hagbard]

Its about as good as any MS OS, and probably a bit more stable than Win98se, imo. Installed on clean disk with mostly new components with an Asus CUSL2-c. I got it so I wouldn't have to mess with the Intel drivers, which are known to cause problems. Good luck. ;-)

....hag

 

[Shamrock]

I love WInME's TCP/IP stack, my downloads (56k) wentfrom 3.6k/sec, and now it is consistantly 4.6-5.3k/sec It's stable enough for home use, but here is a thought.....wipe your hard drive, install WinME, and then install Win2k and dual boot. The best of both worlds.

Shamrock

 

[dcdomain]

I run two machines on WinME at home... the system restore saved my butt a few times. Siblings dont' really know what they are doing...

On my own computer, I run a dual boot, WinME and Win2K, since I'm relatively new to Win2K, and WinME allows me to access the computer when I screw up Win2K (happened twice already).

 

[Adrian Tung]

Dual Boot is fine, but I think it might be a hassle whenever I want to clean re-install an OS (probably WinME in most cases), most probably I'll have to reinstall the other too because the boot loader will get overwritten.


atwl

P.S. While thinking about OSes, I had this idea, since I have a second P-200MMX PC, I could install Win2K Pro on that machine, put my second hard disk which has all my important data, and turn it into a fileserver and dial-up server. Then I can play around with my primary PC any way I like without worrying about having to switch between file systems whenever I want to try out a Win9x kernel (I am always in favour of NTFS and will always convert to NTFS whenever I install an NT-based kernel).

What do you think?

 

[cparker]

Win2k on your 200mhz mmx with only 64megs ram. Forget it. don't even bother. If you must have a server use your win98se or I suppose your ME if you get it. Best would be to dual boot the celery so you can get a feel of both OSs on the same hardware. Then decide what you want to do.

 

[NesuD]

didn't like it at first. It was the idiot proofing that annoyed me. The system restore feature seem to use a lot of overhead. but once i disabled all that and ripped it out of the registry I became much happier with it. It does seem to be a little more stable than 98 and I do like the networking in it as well.

 

[todd_r]

I've been dual booting ME with 2K for about 2 months and it has worked pretty well--I haven't had any real problems with it besides a couple of lockups. In fact, for me it has been more stable than 98. Good luck.

 

[pugh]

same for me,i think it is more stable for myself than win98se or win 98 was.

 

[Brian07]

I'm starting to like it, as mentioned above, I disabled system restore and things smoothed out quite a bit.

 

[Adrian Tung]

I think I'll get a big hard disk and turn my 200MMX into my file repository server. Then I'll have WinME on my PC... unless MS or Creative finally get 5.1 surround working in Win2K though.

atwl