Windows Me

Windows Me (Me for Millennium edition) is the successor to Windows 98 Second Edition, and is scheduled to be released on September 14, 2000. Windows Me is intended for the consumer market, and is not related to Windows 2000 in any way (except for the user interface), meaning it doesn't have any of the advanced features like multi-processor support, NTFS file system, and true 32-bit computing.

Test system

Windows Me Beta 3, dual P2-400 (only one processor used by Windows Me), 3 monitors: Diamond Viper 770 Ultra AGP with Nvidia TNT2 chipset (primary), Diamond Viper 550 PCI with Nvidia TNT chipset, Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro PCI with 3Dlabs Permedia 2 chipset (disabled, doesn't work in this configuration).

New multi-monitor features?

Except for a nice new section on multiple monitors in help, there are no new multimon features, you still can't set the primary monitor as you can on Win2000. Installation of the additional monitors was a bit tricky, after the first boot, drivers for the TNT2 and TNT were installed, for the Permedia 2 Windows Me installed a generic VGA driver. Only the TNT2 was enabled, and going to display settings crashed the system. I had to install a 3Dlabs driver for the Permedia 2, remove the TNT2 and TNT in device manager and reboot. After that I could access display settings and set up everything.

What's new

New user interface with Windows 2000 look-and-feel. The mouse shadow is missing though
Latest versions of everything: Internet Explorer 5.5, Outlook Express 5.5, DirectX 7.1
Windows Media Player 7, with skins. I liked the old one better, but I guess that's a matter of taste
Windows Movie Maker: a simple and easy-to-use video editing application. You start with importing or recording video, audio and still images. After that, you add the media clips to the timeline: there are two tracks, one for video and images, the other for audio. To create a cross-fade transition, simply overlap two clips; other transition types are not supported. When you are finished, Movie Maker saves your movie to an ASF file. ASF is a highly compressed Windows Media file format. You can also upload videos directly to a web server
My Pictures Screen Saver: a multimon-compatible image screen saver
several new games, see the screen shot below for a list

Click on the screen shot to get a look at the new features of Windows Me.

A feature that has been removed is support for real-mode MS-DOS. If you have applications that require booting into MS-DOS, you won't be able to use them with Windows Me.

Should I upgrade from Windows 98?

This is a nice upgrade, but certainly not essential. Basically, Windows Me is still Win98, with all its advantages, such as compatibility and hardware support, and disadvantages, such as instability and lack of advanced features. That said, I certainly appreciated the move to Windows Me: I am dual-booting between Win2000 and Win98 because my brand-new video capture card (DV500) and my scanner don't work on Win2000 yet. Upgrading Win98 to Windows Me gives me the same user interface as Win2000, which makes it easier to switch between the two systems.

More information

Windows Me @ Microsoft
Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows