Windows ME Opinion

[lgvelez]

I have two desktop computers: a P2 450 256 meg ram and an AMD K6 500 256 meg ram. I had Win2K on the P2, but got tired of the heavy OS. I did an FFR, and installed Win98 then WinME. The AMD has only had Win98 on it, and it may stay that way because of an older CD burner. My questions is: how has WinME doing now? Has it settled down from the original bugs? I am using RAM Idle for a memory manager.
Thanks, Laura Velez, MCP
lauravelez@home.com

 

[butchrecon]

Not yet. Its not as stable as Win98SE or Win2000. People will have differant opinoins though.

I suggest going with Win98SE.

 

[DumBunni]

Whenever someone I know mentions ME my skin crawls and I have to try really hard not to literally recoil from them. If you already have 2000 I would go with it. It won't crash, it will auto-detect most hardware and it performs better than ME (by a mile!).

But that's just my opinion. The best way to get a feel for it is to read through this forum. It won't take long for you to come around to my way of thinking. =)

Hell, sometimes I read through here for a laugh. And ME provides the best laugh when it comes to problem related issues.

 

[spkuc]

Don't do it! Stay well away from ME, it's totally unstable but that may be only so on my PC but I hate Me!

 

[CitrixEngineer]

I currently have 3 PCs running ME, 1 running Win98, 3 running W2k, 4 of these dual-boot to Linux. Oh, and an old laptop running Windows 3.11. No laughing, please - respect the elderly. This is my most reliable machine. It has 8Mb of RAM and I do most of my work on it because it never crashes, and Office 4.3 doesn't have that (insert expletive of your choice) paperclip.

For some subjective and unquantifiable reason, bugs apart, I prefer using Win98SE to ME, although some of the features of ME are "nice". There are few patches for ME, because Microsoft have yet to admit to any significant bugs in the product - and, anyway, they're concentrating on XP Home.

The bugs I have seen in ME include random power-ons (I believe this is linked to the Wake on LAN feature), sporadic rebooting, memory and graphics lockups and over-zealous resource usage. This list is not exhaustive, and may relate to software/driver imcompatibility.

The RC (Release Candidate) I am currently testing for XP Home is enormously resource-hungry. Far more so than ME. IME you need at least a PIII 733, or a Duron 500 ;-), 32Mb on your graphics card and 512Mb RAM to get reasonable performance with all the graphics stuff enabled.

W2k is far more solid, and less resource-hungry than XP, but costs more than ME, and is extremely picky about the hardware and software that can be used with it.

Linux is free, much less choosy about the hardware and software, and offers a huge amount of flexibilty. The two big issues are that it requires a long, steep learning curve and there is limited multimedia/gaming support.

Bottom line;

I'd advise sticking with Windows 98 SE, like most of the other respondants here. I've yet to see a Microsoft product that was "consumer-ready" in its first release.

CE