Life With Me: First 100 Days

Anyone who's upgraded to Windows Millennium Edition will tell you it's the best version of Windows ever--or the worst.

"Immediately upon installing Me, all my problems ceased," says investigator Troy Clarke of Nanaimo, British Columbia. But other upgraders call it a "freaking disaster" and "the buggiest Windows I have ever used in my life."

Upgrading to a new edition of Windows has always been a hit-or-miss proposition, depending on your computer's unique combination of hardware and software. But judging from an informal survey of PC World readers and Microsoft's own information on known issues with the OS, we'd say Millennium Edition takes this crapshoot to a new level.

If you're lucky, it'll install with nary a glitch. If not, Windows Me may snub peripherals and programs embraced by earlier versions. The truly cursed will encounter blue screens of death, a computer that won't shut down, or one that won't boot at all.

Some of the readers who responded to the Windows Me survey request on our Web site had upgraded from an earlier Microsoft OS. Others had performed a more arduous clean install, wiping out their existing operating system and installing Windows Me from scratch.

Although the latter approach is supposed to cause fewer problems, even those people who were working with a clean installation occasionally ran into difficulties--most frequently due to missing drivers for peripherals that had run fine under Windows 98.

Some readers who purchased new computers with Windows Millennium preinstalled have encountered glitches and incompatibilities--even with preinstalled hardware and software.