PCA Forums

And what about dual boot with Win 2k? Is that doable? Thanks

Unless you play old DOS games I see no reason to do Win2k solo. Almost all hardware is now fully supported. Check out
http://www.ntcompatible.com/ to see if your hardware/software will run.

I wouldnt sugest win ME for anyreason. ALL of its features can be had in win 98 which is Sadelly more stable then there NEWER win ME. so if Anything do win2K and win 98se. and jsut forget U ever thought of win ME. Your Friends will thank U.

Greg

ME stands for Multiple Errors. You DON'T want it!

winme like everyone else said is very unstable

win98se is better

me crash and burned on 2 of my units and one was not save able it a real MEss of a program

me stands for many errors !

what renovation said

started having that problem and ditched win me

it seems to be okay now (i m on win2k)

Thanks a lot guys!!! I wanted real opinions from real users!!! Thanks again i won't do WIN ME. I will do Win 2K instead.

Agree 100% with Biohazard, i am shit canning this OS again for windows 98SE

Morphius

Yea, I tried winME. At first I kinda liked it. I mean, it wasn't a huge difference from 98se... but the usb worked a lil better for me and stuff like that. But after I loaded more than one proggy on there.. forget it. thing wouldn't restart... it would shut down.. not restart tho. I had every update available for it too. Games and programs would lock all the time.... I finally said forget it and got rid of it and went to win2k

ME is NOT for serious gaming or power users.

Microsoft would like you to think ME is an upgrade, but it's not. It's a consumer OS designed for newbie computer users. It has a ton of idiot-proofing and system recovery features that help prevent a newbie from accidently trashing the installation, or automatically fixes itself if he does.

The price for this is performance. WinME is slower than 98SE in all benchmarks. It also has a much larger hard drive footprint.

ME is not really any stabler than 98SE - both are a DOS based OS and as long as you run a DOS based OS, you'll have stability issues because one misbehaved app or driver can crash the whole system.

As far as improvements, all "improvements" in ME are available as upgrades for 98SE with the exception of the advanced network engine (based on the Win2K network engine) which you'll probably never miss unless you use the computer in a corporate LAN environment.

Stick to 98SE for gaming.

For true stability, try Win2K. I would definately recommend a dual boot as there are still some apps and games, albiet few, that don't run in Win2K. Also Win2K doesn't read Win98's backup files if you use that utility.

You can always delete the Win98 folder later if you need space, but you should consider keeping it. The Win98 boot is a nice safety net option if Win2K gets trashed and won't boot. Keep all your partitions in FAT32 format and you can always boot up into 98 in an emergency.

PLEASE NOTE: Win2K is a MUCH larger and complex OS than 98/ME. As such it has a bigger drive footprint (it requires AT LEAST a 2Gb partition, and even then it's real tight, while 98 will fit on a 500 Mb drive). It also requires a lot more memory. While 128Mb is the minimum I'd recommend for serious gaming in Win98, 256 Mb is the minimum I'd recomend for Win2K.

Also keep in mind that Win2K is more difficult to setup than Win98. While not as arcane as NT 4.0, it's still a much more sophisticated OS than 98 and even setting up your network settings is very different and can be confusing for the un-initiated. However, there's a lot of people using it now so there's a lot of online help available.

Win2K is an outstanding OS. Once you switch you'll never go back. Assuming you have enough ram, it'll feel MUCH snappier in the desktop and it's much stabler. It runs most games just fine.

Hey FP, you said you can get updates for Win98SE to make it look like WinME. The ONLY feature I miss of WinME is that you can view pictures as thumbnails. Is there a microsoft update that you know of to where it will do that in Win98SE? I just love that feature

Yeah, that's a sweet feature - it's in Win2K also (another reason I love Win2K).

I don't think there's a patch for 98 to provide that (in theory it's do-able since it's just an explorer update, but MS may not want to do it).

There may be a third party utility that gives you that feature though - someone once told me about it but don't know what it is.

Thanks all again for clarifying that up for me.