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It's the end of an era.

Windows Me--Microsoft's cutesy abbreviation for Millennium Edition--is billed as the last member of the product line that began conquering the world's desktops five years ago with the ascension of Windows 95. (Yes, Microsoft said the same of Windows 98 before it arrived, but this time the company seems to mean it.)

This final installment in the Windows 9x family includes flashy gewgaws and an important new suite of system recovery utilities, all aimed at device-happy consumers who like multimedia tools and who long for a more crash-resistant PC. Businesses using Windows 95 or 98 will also find things to like about Me. In particular, its recovery capabilities could entice systems administrators who are driven to distraction by users who crash machines after installing unauthorized software. But companies that need rock-solid stability, powerful networking capabilities, and serious security features are far better off migrating to Windows 2000 Professional.

Home is where the heart is for Me. An enhanced digital video and audio player, brand-new digital camera and scanner interfaces, and a basic video editor make Me the most thoroughly multimedia-enabled Windows operating system yet. Windows Me also comes with a new Home Networking Wizard, online games, and the long-awaited shipping version of Internet Explorer 5.5. (See "IE 5.5 Beta Available for Download.")

Watching Your PC's Health

Two powerful system-safety features--which Microsoft has grouped under the general heading of PC Health--are among Me's best innovations. One is an invisible watchdog that prevents disastrous changes to system files. Even better is a rollback tool that lets you revert to an earlier system configuration, helping your PC recover more easily from Windows' inevitable crashes. The rollback tool will be a godsend to anyone who has ever experienced the torture of trying to revive a PC that's been torpedoed by crummy software.

PC World put the final shipping code of Windows Me to the test, trying out its system recovery, file protection, Internet, and digital media doodads. We also compared Me's start-up, shutdown, and overall performance with Windows 98's.

Our conclusion: The Me-exclusive PC Health features are the best reason to invest in the $119 upgrade. But if you aren't pining for recovery features, you don't really need Me. Instead, wait for Microsoft to fix the inevitable bugs and incompatibilities (we found a few), or hold out for the next version of Windows, code-named Whistler. (See "Two Whistlers on the Way.") Meanwhile, enjoy the various new features you can download independently of the OS.

There's More of Me

Though Microsoft isn't touting Windows Me as a performance-boosting upgrade, the company does say the OS boots up faster than Windows 98 SE, and our tests corroborate this claim.

Freed from processing config.sys and autoexec.bat and displaying the whole MS-DOS user interface, Windows Me booted up about 35 percent faster than Windows 98 SE, which takes 84 seconds. Shutdown times, already in the 3-second neighborhood for Win 98 SE, decreased by half.

Overall, Windows Me performed a tad slower than its predecessors on our PC WorldBench 2000 suite of business applications--probably due to the greater number of housekeeping tasks the PC Health features handle. But the performance difference is so small--less than 5 percent in our tests on a group of 21 desktops and five notebooks--that most users won't detect a slowdown in typical business applications. Windows Me also consumes much more disk space than Windows 98 SE.