ME is not for DOS-Freaks.
ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.
ME is the most evolved Win9x OS and is more stable than 95,98 and SE.
Don't buy the "Me is Beta" phrase that everybody badmouthes ME. The Truth : it shipped with prereleases of IE 5.5 and WMP 7.0, now what's that about - install IE 5.5 final or IE6 and WMP 7.1 or 9 and voila everythings solved. In fact the german ME edition came on two CDROMs : one OS, and one with WMP 7.0 final plus some bonus stuff to satisfy customers. The systemresore bug is a bug indeed, but theres a well-known and available hotfix and afterwards its solved. Systemresore works exactly like in XP and it is very reliable.
It's few glitches can all be worked out, in generally it depends all on compatible Drivers : ME had the same problem as vista - when it came out there were only 98 drivers around, but ME wants WDM only. Otherwise ACPI wont work and system stability is in danger.Another thing to consider is that ME needs a lot of CPU power and RAM. 500 MhZ and far more than 128 MB will work wonders.
ME has capabilities not found elsewhere in win 9x :
full ACPI aware: improving cold boot time, pre and post-logon boot times and time required for resuming from hibernation, OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state and other power management features without manufacturer-supplied drivers
WDM Driver modell throughout the OS, less use of VxDs for more stability. Needed for ACPI to work its magic.
Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) instead of TWAIN , still used in XP, support for PICT-Cameras and Scanners ( lots modern devices use this protocol ).
Universal Plug and Play ( UpNp) , detects devices on the network automatically.
Built in Windows 2000 TCP/IP and NDIS networking stack and architecture, more reliable, full-featured, stable and offered better performance over the 98SE stack .
Support for networking over FireWire, IrDA, ( Bluetooth capable with 3rd party drivers like Toshibas famous stack ) a network diagnostic troubleshooter, outstanding Home Networking Wizard which let people share folders,printers or set up a connection-sharing with offline-machines.
native USB support for Mass-storage Devices and external CD/DVD devices, better USB-printer support.
native Firewire support, for DV-Camcorders and the like (think of the Moviemaker application )
far better memory handling than 98SE, especially if more than 256MB Ram is present. Depending on mainboard you wont have to workaround the 512MB - "bug", I have seen PCs with 1GB and ME without any tweak running stable.
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) , Distributed COM+ ,MDAC and JET database working in background like in XP, mainly used for diagnostic-wizards and the PC-Health services like :
SystemRestore, automatic Regstry backups,Signature-Checkers for Files ( ME uses *.CAT files like 2000 and XP ), resulting in System File Protection, automatic recovery of overwritten or deleted core-files ( that's why a Servicepack is hard work, you cannot simply overwrite OS-files with custom ones )
Help and Support Center is by far more userfriendly and interesting to use than 98SE's HTMl-Help. You can access the Microsoft Knowledgebase / Support website inside this application. When you click on the support options you get access to DXdiag,Systeminfo, WMI,Dr Watson and all other system-diagnosis tools. Built in wizards and Troubleshooters.
Multimedia inside, unseen in any Consumer-OS before : MovieMaker , WMP , Internet Games, DirectX Voice chat,DVD,Onlinestuff, MS Agent "merlin" as your talking OOBE- wizard makes this the total multimedia-Windows out of the Box .
DVD player supports software decoding for playback of DVD movies without a dedicated decoder card
Better and feature rich Windows 2000 like Explorer :
Image Preview: In Windows Me, images can be viewed by using the Image Preview utility. It allows users to rotate an image, print or zoom in/out an image. Image Preview supports images with .BMP, .DIB, .EMF, .GIF, .JPEG, .PNG, .TIF and .WMF file formats.
Compressed Folders: Windows Me includes support for ZIP files through a shell extension known as Compressed Folders; allows users to create, access and extract files from ZIP archives similar to a regular folder in Windows. The user can also restrict access to files with a password.
Search facility is integrated into Windows Explorer ( very much like the XP one )
Accessibility extras : Onscreen Keyboard,magnifier, Speech .. prettty good for people that need it.
Well.. that's not all, but the topnotch argument to choose this over 98 my friend.
last my own extra Remark : I have a MS wired keyboard 500 with multimedia buttons, pause/play/Home/Favorites/Calc and such..
In Windows 98 and 2000 I need " the Intellitype software" to make them work..
Only In ME and XP they work without any running software at all Wink
Those little surprises are worth it, believe it or not..
Like I said it is NOT for DOS-freaks..
but for XP-feature seeking and multimedia-loving people on older or less powerful hardware or the need to have games and apps running fast as possible ( I do a lot of Photoshop 7, Poser 5 on a 256MB equipped ME Machine - dont even think of that under XP !).