I am trying to upgrade to Win ME and the installation goes well until 10 mins left and it freezes. It freezes at the hardware detection/plug & play detection. Rebooted several times to no avail. as always freezes at that point. I figure mebbe some hardware problem.

I experienced the same thing, and found it was due in part to my NIC. Try removing all cards, except your video, and reinstall. I may have had compound problems that led to the 10 minutes to go freeze, or at least there were other problems. Check your WIN.INI and SYSTEM.INI for any garbage characters (and remove them or comment them out) - use sysedit or msconfig. The above fixed my 10 minute hang, now if only I could get my Diamond MonsterSound 300MX to work under Win ME Any help out there?

I don't get why a new CDROM would even be dirty but....try cleaning your installation CD. This might not be a problem but your instalation is failing within the time period that MS would say, "Clean the disk" Just a note: I have actually noticed that the cleaning the disk thing works. I can't understand that a sealed, new CDROM should need to be cleaned but aparently sometimes this is the case. Usually you get an error message like SU0235 or something like that. I only make installs from new CD's so when problems arise the last thing that I could suspect as the cause is actually the problem. MS has used a different method to make the CDROM's than in 98. Well, hopefully cleaning the disk works. This happened to me 3 times allready when upgrading customers machines. New CDROM is dirty....LOL

It's either hardware probs or conflicting IRQ's. Try and disable USB in the BIOS... solved my probs. Do this only if your not gonna be using USB any time soon.

check the cpu voltage is correct (especially amd k6)

Until Win ME, had never seen so many suggestions before for "cleaning" a NEW CD ? What the hell is being removed with this cleaning? Wizard droppings? Have heard that soaking WinME CD first in Methylene chloride, completely eliminates ALL, I repeat, ALL crashing, reboots of ME.

Hi Terence, It would help to have a list of the hardware in your machine. I have found that WinME will hang for extended periods while performing PNP searches, especially on older/slower machines. I had the same thing happen while installing WinME on my brother's P-233, but after rebooting a couple times I got through the install ok. I also found that a clean install of WinME goes quicker and easier than installing over another version of Windows. Above all else: have patience! I can't stress that enough. Sometimes when you wait a few minutes longer the process completes and you're on your way. Steven