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Nevertheless, a large number of other survey respondents report that Windows Me is stable and boots quickly, factors undoubtedly responsible for its brisk sales.

According to software sales analyst PC Data, the upgrade is nearly as popular as Windows 95 and Win 98 were, selling 400,000 units in its first month despite enjoying far less hype than those products received.

And whether they like the upgrade overall or despise it, nearly every reader had something good to say about Windows Me's most compelling feature--System Restore. As we reported at the time that Windows Me launched, the ability to recover from ill-fated changes to software, drivers, and settings by rolling your system back to a predisaster configuration remains the paramount reason to consider upgrading to Me.

Though the Windows Me upgrade itself costs as little as $49, there's another price to consider: Dozens of utilities and other apps designed for earlier versions of Windows won't work with the OS (see "Using Windows Me--the Hidden Costs of Upgrading" for a list of the most prominent). If you plan to keep using one or more such programs under Windows Me, you'll need to expand your upgrade budget to pay for new versions--or at least allocate time for lengthy downloads.

And those aren't the only difficulties. By mid-December, a search of Microsoft's knowledge base for the text 'Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem' retrieved 200 incompatibilities, "issues," and other difficulties that the company blames on Windows Me. Searching for the same text for Windows 98 yielded the same number--which probably indicates that 200 is the upper limit on records returned by the site's search engine.

But the same search directed at Windows 98 SE identified only 184 items. And although this data provides only the roughest of measures (we don't know how many problems have been found for Windows Me and Windows 98 in total, for starters), we can say that Windows Me has generated more problem reports in less than three months than Windows 98 SE has in more than a year.

Most of the 200 problems that our search uncovered don't afflict previous versions of Windows. They range from the silly (a pointer problem in Hasbro's Tonka Search and Rescue) to the stupefying (system freezes when you switch between an MS-DOS window and Me's Full Screen mode).

Several upgraders reported an incompatibility between Me and the Point-to-Point-Protocol-over-Ethernet (PPPoE) DSL software commonly used by DSL providers. At least two major services, Verizon and BellSouth, were working on Windows Me updates as of mid-December.

Microsoft has long touted the Windows 9x family as the OSs most compatible with both new and aging consumer hardware and software. So why the compatibility issues in this swan-song edition?

Microsoft consumer Windows product manager Tom Laemmel attributes the absence of some drivers to a combination of factors. More-exacting compatibility testing washed some older drivers out, and a number of manufacturers simply didn't submit new drivers to Microsoft in time for inclusion with the upgrade.

You can still pull out your device's installation CD and reinstall those older drivers after Windows Me is up and running. But if you own a digital camera or scanner, you will almost certainly run into another difficulty: The new Windows Me Imaging (WIA) subsystem is incompatible with manufacturers' Win 98 software. You can reinstall the older software, but you can't use the features of WIA.

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