Woe is ME	Volume 4 Number 7 Nov. 7, 2000	RealAudio

by Scott Tilley

Windows Millennium Edition, aka Windows ME, has been out for a few months now. I've installed it on several different computers, explored its new features, and I'm underwhelmed. If you purchase a new PC with Windows ME pre-installed, you have nothing to be concerned about. But if you already have a PC running Windows 98, I can't see any compelling reason to upgrade to Windows ME. If you're running Windows 2000, there's very little reason to try Windows ME, other than for revive programs than ran under Windows 98 but not under Windows 2000. That is, if you can get Windows ME to install at all.

The Windows ME installation routine provides a nice tour of the new features that Microsoft considers the cornerstones of the newest version of their consumer-oriented operating system: digital multimedia, the Internet, home networking, and an improved user experience. These four pieces are indeed important parts of Windows ME. The rub is that most of these "new" features are in fact available as free downloads from the Microsoft Web site as additions to Windows 95/98.

The main reason I was interested in Windows ME was to run the Input Method Editor (IME), which is used to enter non-English text into applications such as Word and FrontPage. For example, creating the Chinese edition of SIGPC (e.g., cn.srtilley.com/sigpc/v4/n2). For some unknown reason, IME doesn't work under Windows 2000. So I decided to try Windows ME and see if it ran IME (it does). To do this, I had to do a complete installation of the operating system.

ME on a PC

My first trial installation of Windows ME was on a plain desktop PC. The computer is a refurbished E-Machines model, with 128MB of RAM and a Celeron 400 processor. The PC is quite generic, with no special drivers or system requirements. The one wrinkle is that the system is setup to boot multiple operating systems, such as DOS, Linux, and Windows 2000. Windows ME would be the fourth operating system added to the computer.

The Windows ME operating system is not exactly skinny: it requires about 650MB of disk space for a typical installation. If you want to install anything else, such as Microsoft Office, you need still more space. I opted for a new 2GB primary partition on the first hard drive to hold Windows ME and began the installation process. The install itself went fine. The system detected and installed drivers for all the devices save one: my 10/100 Ethernet card. This was a little surprising, since it's a generic network card. However, I had a floppy with a suitable driver and that solved the problem.

As with most Microsoft products, installation often requires that you reboot the system several times before the entire process is complete. I think I rebooted the PC three times for the Windows ME installation. When all was finished, the Windows ME splash screen appeared and everything ran fine. Well, almost; I could not longer boot into the three other operating systems already installed on the computer. Windows ME had clobbered the master boot record, where the operating system selection utility resides, without asking or even bothering to tell me. Luckily, the utility has a repair option that regains control of the master boot record, letting me add Windows ME as another bootable operating system. After this fix, I could run all four operating systems from the same PC. Windows ME performed fine, but with little noticeable difference from Windows 98 SE, except for a few additional software packages that are freely downloadable.

ME on a TP

Since the installation of Windows ME went reasonably well on the desktop PC (master boot record issue not-withstanding), I decided to try to install it on a notebook PC. The notebook is an older IBM ThinkPad, with 80MB of RAM (which is fine) and a Pentium 133 (which turned out to be not so fine). It seems Windows ME has a minimum processor requirement of a Pentium 150. After searching the public newsgroups, I found (as I suspected) that others had encountered this same restriction during installation. Eventually I discovered that there's an undocumented switch on the setup command (/nm) that tells the setup program to bypass the processor speed check. Using this option, the installation proceeded without incident.

I'm not entirely sure why Windows ME has this processor requirement, but I suspect it is due in part to the cycle-hungry Windows Media Player 7, which is integral to operating system's new capabilities. Nevertheless, I found this requirement to be quite odd, since I had previously had Windows 2000 installed on the same ThinkPad and it ran just fine. One would have thought that Windows 2000 would have more onerous system requirements than Windows ME, but I guess that's not totally true.

Once the operating system was installed, I still needed to install ThinkPad-specific drivers. Most troublesome is the driver for the MWAVE device, which handles both audio and modem. There was no Windows ME-specific MWAVE driver on IBM's Web site, and after speaking with their support personnel I decided to try the Windows 98 version of the driver. The result was that Windows ME would not boot after the driver was installed. After the splash screen was displayed, an error window always popped up indicating a problem with one of the system services, at which point the system hung. I could not figure out how to cleanly uninstall the MWAVE driver; I could never get to a Windows ME prompt, even using Safe Mode. My only choice was to reinstall the operating system from scratch, but this time without audio or modem support. This configuration worked, but some of the ThinkPad's features were crippled.

Is ME for You?

Is Windows ME for you? That depends on the type of computer you have, your need for backwards compatibility, and your interest in multimedia. Windows ME is billed as a Net-savvy, multimedia-enhanced version of Windows 98. It is these things (although some people have experienced problems with DSL modems when upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows ME). But you can add most of the "new" capabilities of Windows ME to a Windows 98 PC just by downloading and installing the free software upgrades available from the Windows upgrade site run by Microsoft. For now, I'm sticking with Windows 2000, Linux, and the Mac OS. Windows ME is not for me.