PCA Forums

Ok guys.. Looking for your thoughts on WindowsMe.. I've had to completely reformat 3 peoples HD's and do clean installs of ME in the past two weeks. Before doing this, they would crash upon opening almost any application. Burn a CD CRASH! Open IE CRASH! Play HalfLife CRASH! I mean what's up? They work find after I do a clean run. But if I use restore disks provided it doesn't fix the issue. Any ideas what's going on? Is it just ME? LMK... eGo

it's really neither fish nor fowl. I'd stay with 98se or 2k. ME had a lot of stuff put in it so they could sell something when xp wasn't ready -

Thanx John.. BTW isn't that the guy from B&W? Just curious.. On another note.. I don't have a copy of windows98 SE I do have the first version of 98, as well as 95.. And I also have a copy of XPro. Is it worth spending the money on 98SE? Or should I just be putting XPro on my machines (that can handle it)? eGo

for me, ME didnt last past 3 months...it also sucks as an OS besides the fact that it doesnt last. its 98se on FAT ware.

Greg

ME was never a power users OS. What it was meant for, and works great as, is an OS for computer newbies.

It's a much safer OS to put in grandma's computer. If she gets it in her head to delete the whole Windows folder, ME will usually try very hard to prevent her from doing it, and even if she succeeds it'll generally fix itself or restore an earlier restore point by itself.

Frankly if you're concerned about stability I'd go with Win2K or XP.

That windows me, while good for novice users, is not a good thing for persons who know a little bit more about computers? For instance someone who is going to do a lot of burning CD's downloading and gaming or photo editing probably wouldn't want to use ME? You have all been a great help. I always felt there wasn't enough time between OS' between 98 and all the predecessors to XP. This just kind of confirms my beliefs.. lol.. eGo

it is the lil' guy from B & W

If by "Photo Editing" you mean Photoshop then I would HIGHLY recommend 2K or XP. Photoshop benefits in performance GREATLY from a true multi-threaded, multi-tasking operating system.

Photoshop, being a memory hog, also runs much better on an NT-based OS (like 2K or XP) which are much more efficient at memory management.

Keep in mind that 2K & XP need more base memory than Win9x does. Bare minimum I would recommend is 256Mb. If you do Photoshop work then I'd put at least 512Mb in it.

At the moment, i believe that 2k /w service pack still has the best stability, althou i use XP PRO because of the cool GUI, it is pretty stable, i just find that in all OS's there is going to be problems of corse, but ME IS THE PROBLEM. Therefore another vote to go 2k or XP, i wouldnt go backwards to 98se unless you have no other choice.

If you already have XP pro go for that by a large margin, winME is total crap and I've never seen it working well for anyone longer than the first month or so.

I know there's a lot of dislike for ME out there but thankfully I didn't know it when I first got it. Had no more problems than with 98se and still have ME on my daughters and m-in-laws machine running just fine.

Whenever I'd ask an ME question, I'd draw a lot of 'rants' without much info other than 'needs a lot of memory' and has more options.


I do like XP better though.

Well I'm an inadvertant ME user for now. The second hand lappy I got on a trade comes with ME.

I started downloading all the drivers, patches and BIOS updates required for Win2K and began to realize that I really didn't want to screw with it right now - I just don't have the time.

Besides, these Compaq laptops get finicky whenever you try to set them up anyway but how the factory set them up, and I don't feel like having stability issues when I go to Miami next month for a week and a half.

So I ran the the Recovery CD and put everything back the way it was from the factory, then proceeded to lobotomize WinME Once you turn all the BLOAT crap off it's okay.

Disabled System Restore (I put 2 partitions on it and I Ghost Image my boot partition regularly).

Disabled just about all the "idiot proofing" background apps (and gained a good 15% resources).

Uninstalled PnP Networking (bloat & serious security risk).