Windows Millennium Edition: All About Me

There's More of Me

Though Microsoft isn't touting Windows Me as a performance-boosting upgrade, our tests did corroborate the company's claim that it boots faster than Windows 98 SE.

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

Overall, Windows Me ran a tad slower than its predecessors on our PC WorldBench 2000 business applications suite--probably due to the housekeeping tasks the PC Health features handle. But the difference is so tiny--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.

Microsoft says that your PC needs at least a 150-MHz Pentium CPU to run Win Me--and the company means it. Try installing the OS on a slower machine, and you'll get a polite error message saying, "Sorry, but you need a faster processor--and by the way, click OK to exit Setup." I overrode the 150-MHz limitation on my ancient Pentium-75 laptop (using the command setup /nm) just to see whether the OS would run at all. The installation dragged on for nearly two hours, but afterward Windows Me appeared to run just as well as Windows 98--which is to say, extremely slowly. I couldn't do much with the computer anyway: Windows Me's default installation gobbled up 657MB of my laptop's undernourished 774MB drive. I probably could have gained some breathing room by disabling or uninstalling individual features, but I chose to back out of Me instead. Fortunately, the uninstall routine returned me to Windows 98 without mishap.

Even if your PC meets Microsoft's system requirements (which include 32MB of RAM, 320MB of free disk space, and an Internet connection), you may want to think twice before upgrading. Most of the good stuff is available for downloading into a Win 9x environment. And in jumping to Me, you forfeit some compatibility--mainly with older DOS programs and drivers. A read-me file on the installation CD-ROM says Adaptec's GoBack, NAI's PGP Desktop Security, and some antivirus utilities may prevent Win Me from installing; you'll have to disable them first.