Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)During the installation process for Windows ME (I was upgrading my laptop from 98) I was presented with a myriad of screens telling me how great Windows ME was and how much change was influenced by "customer requests" and issues from their support department.
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.

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With the cutely named Windows Me (for Millennium Edition), Microsoftraises the bar a bit with a new operating system that you'll certainly want toconsider for your next new PC. While this version will probably not be acompelling upgrade for most Windows 95/98 users, the newest member of theWindows operating-system family bundles a number of minor improvements aimed atmaking computing life easier for home users.There are several noteworthy features in Windows Me, even if no one featurereally stands out. First, we liked that Windows Me boots noticeably faster. Thereason is that the underpinnings of DOS have been removed from this new release.One result of this absence is that you can no longer boot to a command window asin Windows 95/98 without special diskettes. (Also, don't expect Windows Me tosupport older hardware that uses virtual device drivers written in the days ofyore.) Of course, you can still run DOS command sessions within Windows Me.Besides removing legacy support for DOS, Windows Me adds several otherimprovements to reliability. The most important is that every 10 hours or so,the operating system automatically backs up its system files (just like Windows2000), thus reducing the chance of your system being corrupted. Windows Me alsoborrows the TCP/IP stack (the low-level code that connects to the Internet) fromWindows 2000, meaning you should have slightly more reliable networkingconnections. For laptop users, you can also hibernate a session and restore itquickly, another feature borrowed from Windows 2000.The personality of Windows Me also changed a bit for the better. Principally,you can take advantage of personalized menus, which show the most frequentlyaccessed menu choices on the Start bar and hide the others.

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Windows 98: Second Edition Review

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(More customer reviews)I don't buy 'bleeding-edge' operating systems and softwares anymore unless they've been out on the market for at least 3 months. Historically Microsoft has been so eager to make sales that most of their products have been released half-baked & the customer winds up risking invaluable data by installing them, wasting hours of time diagnosing problems that can't be fixed by an end user, and investing a significant amount of money in hemorroidal ointments. The 2nd Edition of Win98 is what the 1st Edition of Win98 should have been (in fact, it's what the 1st Edition of Win95 should have been). The 1st Edition of Win98 was garbage; a lot of hype, a lot of stuff most people remove once installed, and a total pig on system resources. This 2nd Edition is stable enough to risk upgrading from Win95 for production and home stations and has enough fixes in it to warrant its price. One recommendation: if you can avoid it, don't buy the Win98 2nd Edition Upgrade as it's buggier than Win98 1st Edition. Install Win98 2nd Edition from scratch. I know the Win98 2nd Edition 'Upgrade' is cheaper. There's a reason for it, people.

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Microsoft Windows 98 has quickly become the standard operating system for the vast majority of (non-Macintosh) personal computer owners. If you're thinking about upgrading from Windows 95, or adding Windows 98 on to a multi-OS platform, you'll get a comfortable, fairly intuitive graphical user interface, with point-and-click simplicity. The biggest (and most controversial) feature of Windows 98 is its deep Internet integration. The Internet Explorer browser bundled with Windows 98 pops up constantly, inviting you to connect to the Internet and surf the Web quickly and easily. All the plug-ins you need are supported, and for folks who don't want a high level of under-the-hood control of their OS and Internet software, the stability of the combo can't be beat. In fact, diehard Netscape users often don't uninstall Internet Explorer from Windows 98 because the program is so deeply integrated in the OS. Windows 98 has all the features of Windows 95, but some have been retooled, renamed, and spruced up. Perhaps the nicest improvement about Windows 98, though, is its use of a better file allocation system, enabling much more efficient use of hard drive space. Windows 98 supports the most widely used software programs, peripherals, and hardware, and it comes standard on most new PCs in the United States.

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