what i found out is that ME is not like all the other windows OSes out there. it is by no means "user-friendly". for someone that is lookin for a computer to just exchange emails, instant message and listen to MP3s, go with something more user-friendly, something like 98SE. but if you know what your doing, and have a deep knowledge of computers (dealing with the registery, modifying files, ect) then you can tweak ME to be more stable than 2k. i used to think 2k was the most stable, and it was always crashing on me. a friend told me that he uses ME, and i did some research, everyone said that its a horrible OS. yet my friend praises it. so i tried it, and now i swear by it that its the best OS for those that know computers.

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"The person who owns the business has asked me to take ME off and put 98SE on the machine, because he read somewhere that ME was terrible and crashed all the time." The blind should not tell you when to cross the street. and "1) it blue screens A LOT 2) if you leave it on for an extended period of time(like 8hours for a normal work day) - it'll slow down to a crawl - you're gonna need a reboot - but that may take up to 10 mins if you're trying to save your work - at this time a simple CTRL+S will take a good while - if you run a memory intensive program like a photoshop - you might need to reboot every hour - your milage may vary 3) you cant push the machine to its full potential. there are so many useless background services running you'll be running at 3/4 speed compared to a win2000 or a linux" Bullshirt

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ME is worth while IF u maintain it as u would any OS! scans, defrags, updates and spybot, adware etc r all valuable programs so make use of them. My Me did blue screen for no reason, slow down, low system resources BUT these are solvable problems and they were wiped away when i optimised ME and started to take care of it! and with the background services well u need to msconfig it. SO deity_me what ur saying is true only because u let it happen :P

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hello i like m.e works fine with proper care. dont use windoz as much any more as red hat linux is working grate for me allso.

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yeah i also agree linux is a far better OS and u were right to state that Me wasn't programmed with those properties in mind :DBUT linux does wipe the floor with *most* OS's and definately more customisable... trouble is MS is mainstream and nearly everyone uses a MS OS somewhere along the line...

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I know where Win 9X fits into the the NT based (XP) and *nix based systems - but am only looking for a 98SE vs ME debate. So many people wanna slam it saying its far more unreliable than yet nobody has been able to list specific defects that ME has that 98SE doesn't. All versions of Windows need to be looked after with the usual housecleaning.

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I like it because of the cute Me logo. I wish I could find a font like the Me logo. Other than that, no problems. It's great and the drivers are all updated. I was really getting tired of the "clouds" startup screen.... Oh and, no wire hangers!!

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LOL Joan. Again I prefer it over 95, 98 and XP. Although once I got the blue screen and had to format. This after encountering many other issues. After that I didn't install spyware. Set it up per trev's tweaks advice. Got a firewall. Installed SpywareBlaster. Installed SPG. Antivirus of course. Spybot and Adaware. Changed the default IE settings. etc. etc. In short what anybody should do with any operating system. And I never use wire hangers on my computer. Have fun fellow ME users. RandyL

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gees how did I miss this one. I am glad to see some happy ME users out there. One of my first experiences with me I would haveto say was far from, pleasent. BUT guess what it was not the OS it was the nut behind the mouse. One of the posts above says something about spending time tuning it. I AGREE 100% with that statement. And once all is done and all programs are laoded, just tell it it is a network server and not a desktop computer, and watch the diff. One golden rule about ME , you must perfoma a clean install, that is one of the bigest secret's of ME. I will quote a section taken from the missing manual series written by David Pogue, A Computer Press Association Award Winer. "It's easy to see how veteran PC fans might be tempted to shrug off Windows ME as just a rehash. But that would be a mistake. In windows ME Micrososft has made some impressive and worthwile improvements to the most used operating system in the world."Involve the removal of time honoured annoyances: silly error messages, poor installer design, fragile file systems, and so on. You are likely to keep discovering Micrososfts sweet little nips and tucks for months on end." You know he was right, I'v just built my self another small play rig, just for ME. For the ME kickers -- GET A LIFE and learn how to install and set it up correctly.

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I actually have Windows Me to thank for making me so proficiant in making a O/S run smoothly ! Iam a late comer to the world of computing , I purchased my frist PC in October of 2000 ! Its a P3 750MHZ 256M.B. RAM ! Because of the problems with random error's , freeze ups and BSOD .I,thru coming to sites like this ,Windows Me for Dummies and a neighbor thats a senior software engineer .Poor guy I drove him nuts with my phone calls "Help my PC is messing up ". Since then I've become pretty good at troubleshooting computers .Even ones with differant O/S .I know how to find a fix and how to cary it out .I found that I love working with the hardware and installed a sound card a video card ,added RAM ,added a internal CD-RW to compliment the DVD-ROM it came with. I installed Norton Utilities , which found many erors and fixed them .I ,thru MSCONFIG ,trimed down the applications loading at startup ! My user resources went from the low 70's after a fresh boot ,to 94% free ! All in all its been a great ride ! Now if I would have listened to some people I would have an Apple ,which are known to be very stable,and I would be bored to death ,and not have meet so many great people online ,mostly here at computing.net ! Thanks to All,Nick

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nick i agree and m.e has helped me learn a bout computers.

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Joan love. Wire hangers darling ! ....Beneath you. Me and the girls at weight watchers have clubbed together, the furry leopard skin cow horn hangers are wheelin their way as we speak darling. Hugs. X

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The only thing better (from Micro$oft) is Windows XP Pro. But Windows ME can be very stable. I have one system that runs for months between being rebooted (OK, it is a server, but I still use it for backup). But you do have to clean it up a bit. There are four major problems with Windows ME, three of which you can fix. First problem is that MicroSoft added a lot of "network support tools" to Windows ME that just do not work. This can be fixed by removing TaskMonitor and PCHealth from Startup, and PCHealth and TuneUp from Scheduled Tasks, disabling automatic updates for Windows and Internet Explorer, and clearing the System Restore files once a month. And of course, installing all the updates from the Windows Update site. Second problem is that Windows ME requires different and better quality device drivers. Even many of those that shipped with Windows ME have problem. So you MUST update all the hardware device drivers. System board chip set drives must be updated. Video drivers are critical. Printer drivers are still a bit of a mess. Lexmark has never fixed its Windows ME related problems, they cause system hangs and shutdown problems. One of the major device driver problems that has been causing random shutdown hangs and delays has just been recently fixed. REALTEK recently (after two years) released a new device driver for its RTL8139/8810x Network cards. So if you have a RealTek network card, be sure to get this new update (v6.06) from RealTek.com.tw for Windows ME 2003/09/05. Third problem, is a fixable minor memory management bug if you try to use more than 640MB of memory. This can be fixed with a Microsoft documented change to the SYSTEM.INI file. But you are still limited to 1GB of RAM. Last problems, Micro$oft has basically acknowledged but offered no fixes for, is some problems with random Plug&Play hangs during bootup (blue screen, have to power off and reboot) and a VXD and device driver inter communications problem that causes random hangs after booting and shutdown problems. This can be avoided by starting as few programs as possible in the StartUp list and having the latest drivers for all hardware. The problem occurs during startup and makes the system unstable. Most systems only see the problem in 1 out of a hundred boots. Some older system boards might see it as often as one out of ten boots. But once up and running stable, it is not a problem. So Windows can be very stable with a little work.

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So, to answer your question, I'd rather run Me than 98se...and I love 98se. Skip

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Wider point(ish) and a Saturday morning rant(ish) It always did baffle me this one. ME and bad press ain't in it ! I think it started out with people just being utterly entrenched in 98, which is fair enough, you get used to and like what you know and what's familiar. A lot of people just didn't want or couldn't put the little effort in it takes to run ME well. To me, a fully tweaked and stripped down ME OS is fast and very stable, thank you very much. It does everything I want it to at home and I'm like a lot here who run some pretty heavy packages on it and use other OSes daily. The only problem that this OS has ever given me was of my own making. End of story. I'll add to that. Having watched a considerable number of peoples computing habits, who have ME (and other OSes for that matter), it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that they get the kind of error messages, glitches, BSODs, et al, they get. More than frequently it's not the OS it's what they've done to make an OS wince in the first place. And a lot of the time in ME's case, they blame it for being a crap. That's pretty unfair and it's ignorant, but life's like that sometimes. LOL, unfair. I sound like it's a person who needs defending ....Well a word or two doesn't go a miss when a slightly exaggerated portrait is being portrayed. ME is not perfect by ANY means but within the limits of what it can do, it does just fine ! I really do think a lot of the time it comes down to how users use there computers and OS and arrive at sweeping generalisations. Like, ME is S***E. I have a friend who I marvel at on a regular basis and hope he isn't in the vicinity. He formats ME often because he finds things are corrupted or missing. I've sat and watched him using his computer many many times and pointed out that he is extremely impatient with it and he doesn't allow processes to complete before piling on more instructions and that multi tasking is fine, but do you REALLY need ALL that going on ?! After one format I gave him one of my apps disks that has all the windows updates for ME on it, I told him to use that rather than going getting them all. I sat and watched out of curiousity what he'd do, I didn't say anything as he fired the disk up and installed EVERY single update and security patch consecutively without rebooting in between. I also caught him doing it on a 2k installation, needless to say in the following boot he was stuck for days while windows digested them all. On the 2k one he ended up formatting AGAIN because he got so pissed off with it trying to update the 15 or so updates he'd rammed down it's throat. It just couldn't handle it. I just sat there and laughed and asked him how long he'd been using a computer, knowing full well the answer. He said, since 3.11, why ? So we had a "back to basics" chat. If your the sensible type who reads READMEs and takes a brief moment and thinks about what they're doing before launching into something, then you aren't going to have much of a problem with ME ....or most other things for that matter. Put it like this. Take a look at most message boards on the web, especially general security ones, and look at how viruses, trojans and worms are spread on the net and look at how they get on peoples rigs. Usually it's a lack of care and a lack of basic common sense computing principles and knowledge, that's got them on a message board in the first place. Common sense principles like, don't open strange emails, don't open attachments, use a good firewall that's configured properly, use a good reputable anti virus software package and keep it updated, make sure it scans email, use the free spyware tools that god provided, don't use P2P apps that are stuffed full of spyware and download "free" software, etc.... Now look at the crap that's on some peoples boxes, ranging from bucket loads of untested badly coded freeware, screensavers, cracked software. The list is endless. It's no wonder all this and all the related issues that goes with it spills over into OS related forums. Again, who get's blamed ? ....Well sometimes, the OS get's it. 8-| Has this all been said before ?? Pretty darn sure it has. :) Anyway it's daylight time, time for something constructive, like the outdoors.

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for all those people who say windows me is good , i wlole heartedly agree, i use it all the time with no problems,,,, i use it as coffee coaster, isn't that what its for? hmmmmmmmmmm?

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