Hi All:
___Have any of you done a Live Update with an installed from scratch Win98 SE lately? The download alone will make you want to upgrade to Win ME
___As for the Windows 2000 Pro and Server fans, the one thing for us HTPC?ers (Home Theater PC users), is the lack of AC-3 pass-thru under Windows 2000. Win98 SE does give you this capability currently but not without some latency effects. These effects are not noticed for the most part but a QFE SP for Win98 SE is due out soon to fix this. Win98 (not SE) will never have the QFE patch made available to it. Win ME on the other hand is patched (or whatever you would like to call it) right out of the box. Windows 2000 will not have the WDM driver/AC-3 pass-thru capability until SP2 is released so it is a none player in the HTPC market using either WinDVD 2000 ver. 2.2.92 or PowerDVD 2.55.0620 or later with no DD/DTS capabilities. As for custom Timings and Resolutions to connect up to and synch to HD FP/RP/DV TV?s for the best display, Nvidia has yet to release the driver sets capable of this manipulation with Windows 2000. The Win98 SE drivers have had this capability via the ELSA cards driver package and/or by using Power Strip 3.0 beta for quite some time now. Both 3Dfx and Matrox have released beta drivers with this capability under Windows 2000 but again, until this capability is released, there are many HTPC users that will have to forgo Windows 2000 for the time being.
___My experience with WinME is that it is about as stable as Win98 SE using the latest HW and drivers. I say stable in that I haven?t seen a BSOD in about a month while using Win ME and it is good for ~ 3 ? 5 days between boots while having my 56K dial up open for days on end before system resources are down to the magic 25% forcing a reboot. Again, this is not Windows 2000 as everyone already knows. Windows 2000 can run for months or so it appears whenever I boot into that OS. I like the new interface but it is probably due to the Windows 2000 blue desktop and similar GUI ?
___Norton Utilities 2000 has a few issues but not many. I have read that Speed Disk causes problems with scrambled data but I have yet to see any. PowerQuest?s Drive Image Pro 3.0x and Partition Magic 5.0 cannot launch from the desktop except for partitioning second drives under Windows because of the inability to get to DOS after boot but work fine if you boot your system from a DOS boot disk. Norton?s Internet Security is supposedly having huge problems but Zone Alarm 2.1 works fine. Games work for me just as in Win98 SE so that is really not a problem either.
___I hope those that do decide to upgrade have as good an experience as I have had with MS products as of the last 2 years.
___Good Luck
___Wayne R. Gerdes
___Hunt Club Farms Landscaping Ltd.
___
xcel@midwest.idsonline.com