Is it just me or does Windows ME totally SUCK?

[sfloriII]

Ask it to do more than three things at the same time and it crashes.

Click on a website (arlington cinema and drafthouse) and it decides you wanted to shut down completely! What a piece of JUNK!

I have a free upgrade to Windows XP that I'd have to pay to have installed. Should I go ahead and do it?

Thanks!

[The Warden]

Windows ME is a bug, plain and simple as that. I've actually grown to like the Win 9X systems (I was one of those who strongly resisted the pressure to upgrade from Windows 3.11 to Windows 95 way back when), and have come to the conclusion that ME is useless.

I have to ask, though, why would you have to pay someone to upgrade to XP? I haven't tried an XP install, but I haven't had any problems re-installing 98SE...

[sfloriII]

I started the self-install a long time ago, got scared, and stopped!

I was afraid that I'd lose a lot of valuable files and all.

I'm not much of a computer guy! :p

[The Warden]

IIRC, if you install XP "properly", it demands that you reformat your hard drive, so you need to back up everything you care about first. I think you can install XP on a FAT32 system and have it work (meaning that you don't have to reformat the drive), but XP won't work as well as it's designed to.

The big problem, at least as it was explained to me, with Win9X is the FAT32 file system; apparently, it's inherently unstable, which is what leads to crashes and eventual re-installing. So, that needs to go away, and that's the big advantage of XP.

I'd do the XP upgrade, except for the fact that there are a few programs I regularly use that aren't XP compatible and can't be inexpensively replaced...

[sfloriII]

Cool! Thanks for the information.

So I need to back up all my photos, files, photoshop program, etc. first? Then take the computer over to Comp-USA or something and have them install XP?

[Vronsky]

I'm running XP now for 10 months, and IMHO its great, never any failures. Can really recommend it. Did get it on a new PC though (Pentium 2,4 Ghz) cann't say about installing it on older systems.

[sixto]

Vronsky is right - make sure you have enough of a PC to run XP or you'll be in worse shape than you're in now.

Sixto
95 S420
91 300SE
87 300SDL
83 300SD

[OhioMercedesBoy]

XP will run decently on as low as a 900 Mhz system. I have it on a K6-2 450 at home and it is alright, albeit slow. My desktop here is an athlon XP 2200+ and it has no qualms about running it. Back up your data, and don't worry about your programs as long as you have the original install discs (you can't just back up a program and then copy it back to the new install, it won't work), and follow the Windows XP install. Don't be afraid to do it yourself, as long as your data is backed up. Learn by doing, not paying someone else to do.. installing Win XP is cake, as it walks you through EVERYTHING. Once you have had XP for 2 weeks, you will never want to go back to the 9.x family. I got XP 3 months before it came out as a Beta rollout, and then bought it through my school, and have been a convert for a while now.
If you have any questions, feel free to message me; as I am used to helping people out and enjoy it (I am majoring in Computer Science Engineering, and am a student TA in 2 freshman level Intro to Computers courses... I have had everything from the hacker to the guy who thought a mouse was a remote... :::sighs::: )
~D.J.~

[haasman]

Run, don't walk to your Windows XP upgrade.

Win ME does SUCK. I beta-tested windows 95, 98, 98SE, ME and XP before their official releases. XP is so stable in comparison I put my mother-in-law on it. She used to call me every Sunday with all sorts of questions. I rarely get a call from her now that she is on XP.

Since the tech crash here in the Valley, I have been helping people with their computers. I have not had one bad experience in moving people to XP. Be sure and check the minimum system requirements and also check with your computer manufactur's support site for XP migration. Some drivers native to XP will work great, others need to be downloaded.

It is always a good idea to back no matter what changes you do to your operating system. I have two hard drives on each computer. One is the daily use drive, the other is dissabled in WinXP and is the backup drive. I use Norton Ghost to image the first drive to the second drive.

Remember, the best way to upgrade is to perform a fresh install. Lengthy but you are ensured of not having past legacy crap. Second best is to use a really good registry cleaner, such as the one found in System Mechanic. BTW, you can download it and try it for 30 days.

I highly recommend that you do not take your computer to such places as CompUSA. They try hard but they have no vested interest in getting right. I feel so strongly about this that if you send me your computer and Win XP, I will upgrade it for free.

If you are concerned about compatibility, when you first start the install, you can check your computer by using I believe the third or fourth choice of the initial install menu to check your system and create a report. Some items will be listed as critical, others to be considered.

Haasman

[ericnguyen]

I'm really surprised that some of you are still using Win9x/ME.
WinME was the successor to Win98/98SE and was especially notorious for crashing and was not well-liked by most users.

Among this family of closely related Win OSes (i.e. Win95, Win95OSR2, Win98, Win98SE, WinME), Win95OSR2 was the smallest (occupied little hard disk space) and pretty reliable, and Win98SE was the most stable (among this OS family :-). WinME was the most bloated OS Microsoft has ever produced, and it was loaded with multimedia junk galore, very slow and very crash-prone. Stay away from WinME.

Now let's forget about WinNT 4.0, since device drivers for new hardware peripherals (especially video/digital camera, multimedia stuff) are almost non-existent for WinNT. You would be much better off with either Windows XP or Windows 2000 Pro (Windows 2003 exists but there is no Workstation/Pro version for Windows 2003. It's designed exclusively for server tasks).

Windows XP is very user-friendly, in terms of its ability to automatically detect and install device drivers for many new hardware peripherals (especially multimedia hardware). Windows XP has 2 different releases: Windows XP Home Edition and Windows XP Professional Edition. Win XP Home is not designed for use on a network (I mean a local area network or LAN), because it's intended to be used on a single personal computer at home, and its file system is still based on FAT32 (same as Win9x/Me family). Windows XP Pro Edition is intended for business users, where it has the ability to join a domain and network with other computers in a LAN (which translates into easier network resource sharing but with high security protection). Windows XP Pro also uses NTFS file system, just like Windows 2000/2003 family.

The main reason why WinXP/2000/3003 OS family is much more stable than Win9x/ME is thanks to the hardware abstraction layer used in WinXP/2000/2003. It abstracts the hardware differences from higher layers of Windows OS (thus rendering the OS more portable on different hardware platforms), while preventing user-space (userland) software processes from having direct access to the lower layer hardware. Think about having several applications (e.g. games) trying to take control of a hardware device (e.g. a sound card) simultaneously. Shared memory corruption is almost very likely. Memory corruption translates into crashes.

The NTFS file system used in WinXP/2000/2003 also contributes somewhat to the stability of these operating systems. However, the major advantage of NTFS over FAT32 is that it has some form of a true journaling file system (like Ext-3 file system in Linux), which keeps track of read-write transactions on hard drives, and so is much better in maintaining data integrity after crashes (e.g. power outage etc...). With FAT32, it's very easy to lose data on hard drives, due to crashes.

NTFS is also capable of supporting almost unlimited hard drive space. FAT32 is limited to 2GB or 4GB (depending on what OS you're using).

Eric

[jpb5151]

Originally posted by sfloriII
I have a free upgrade to Windows XP that I'd have to pay to have installed. Should I go ahead and do it?

DIY. Even if you get someone to install it for free, you'll be the first one having to deal with it if something breaks. Maybe buy a book from CompUSA instead, then dive in. ? You'll be better off in the long run learning how to do it all yourself.

[Botnst]

Windows XP at work has been the most stable Windows product we've ever used. It rarely crashes, perhaps only 1-2/week. This is way down from 2-3/week under NT, and (what seemd like) hourly under 3.1.

Two programs that seem unstable under XP are Lotus Notes and Erdas Imagine. But I like the programs so much that I just plan around it.

My oldest has XP on her new Dell laptop and has not had a crash (used it for about 2 mos) and the thing plugs in and shares files with no problems to our Mac-dominated LAN at home (2 Macs).

OS-X (Mac) has never crashed.

Botnst

[TTaM]

Originally posted by OhioMercedesBoy
XP will run decently on as low as a 900 Mhz system.
~D.J.~

I've been running XP Professional on my 633Mhz machine for almost 2 years now and have never had a problem. I had ME before, it was a miserable system

[BenzOnline]

My Dell 1.8 GHZ for some reason came with ME and yes it was a disaster! I immediately upgraded to XP professional and it has to be the best Windows I ever used.......looks nice and new and simple to use.

Windows 2000 I have on my school labtop and it aint bad eitheir.

[Lebenz]

Windows ME was never very popular due to it’s timing between Win98 and XP. It is every bit as functional and reliable as 98. The real issue that changes in operating systems is memory protection and isolation. Every program uses memory. A lot of programs are flaky. When a program crashes, most commonly it is because the program reads from or writes to some location of memory that is outside of its boundary. In addition, sometimes, BTW, when the program is installed it will replaces certain driver library (.dll) and similar files. With a NT platform each application is given more or less a blank memory slate in which to operate. With the Win 3.x-ME platforms, all applications share a common pool of memory. This is why, in the non-NT versions of Windows, sometimes an application can crash and everything appears okay, until the next application either reads from or writes to some of the trash left by the earlier application.

Windows XP, like the NT platforms before it, use isolated memory locations, plus it protects vital DLLs and similar other files from being over-written. All of which amounts to a more reliable OS.