PLanning to format - Win ME good choice to install??

[Cisco Kid]

I was wondering, I am gonna format soon and currently use Win 98 SE, but have given thought to installing ME after the format. I 3D game a bit not tonnes and also thought about a dual boot using Win 2000 pro, does it support most games?

I am concerned Win 2000 may not support some of my peripherals , do not know much about either os , HELP

Cisco Kid

[Ghaz]

Okay, I work for dell as a tech. I can tell you first hand for the most part ME sucks. It always has lots of problems. Win2k supports most peripherals but there might be a few complications. Games run fine in it, better actually. I say that from my first hand experiance, its what I use at home. I use a dual boot of win98/win2k. I have win98 on there for anything that wont work under 2k, which is not too much. I use win2k for everything and love it. I highly recommend a similar duel boot of win98se/win2k sp2.

[UnseenMenace]

Originally posted by Ghaz
Okay, I work for dell as a tech. I can tell you first hand for the most part ME sucks. It always has lots of problems. Win2k supports most peripherals but there might be a few complications. Games run fine in it, better actually. I say that from my first hand experiance, its what I use at home. I use a dual boot of win98/win2k. I have win98 on there for anything that wont work under 2k, which is not too much. I use win2k for everything and love it. I highly recommend a similar duel boot of win98se/win2k sp2.

The fact that you say WinME sucks is just an opinion which is similar to mine about Dell. Some users have had bad experience with Dell and also with WinME but saying that either sucks does not answer the question asked and only displays a bias opinion based on your experiences and understanding.

The Win98se OS is a fairly stable version of the 9x platform and as such I would not suggest upgrading to ME if your system is stable and does what you require.
Win 2000 may be a more stable and secure OS than the Win98 se platform however its gaming capabilitys are not as good as the Win9x platform.
The WinME platform is just a tarted up WinSE and runs perfectly fine on my system, however it is fussy about hardware and as such will either be great or cause you nothing but problems imho.. this is not to say it sucks though

[Ghaz]

Okay, I am not talking about experiances at dell only. I have been using computers for a long time. I am talking about experiances I have had and had with other computers I have worked on (not dells). I have had problems with installing drivers, running programs, just generaly having it crap out. I have not had those same issues with win98 or win2k for the most part. Games run better under win9x thats true, but they run fine for me under win2k. I play alot of games too, everquest, half life: counterstrike, many graphic intensive programs so I have a feel for how it works. I am not biased at all to ME because of dell, I agree for the most part dell sucks, I just work for them, but I hate ME, had nothing but problems with it for the most part. Yes it runs fine for some and it even may run great for you, but its an operating system that everyone wonders why it was made....No real reason, its just there to make microsoft money. Good luck on your decision.

[Jon]

I run ME over 98SE simply because I don't want to have to install 98 and then the SE upgrade I have. I don't have any problems running ME on the secondary system it's on at the moment but have had boatloads of problems on a couple of the other systems I have. All depends on your setup in my opinion.

One thing I have found, and I'm not certain where the true problems lies, but I have attempted dual booting WinME and Win2K on 3 separate machines with 3 separate IDE RAID controllers and have ended up with completely corrupted OSs after about 2 weeks. They all just deteriorated over a period of time. The were all different hard drives used as well. I'm not sure if it had to do with the RAID setup or not. Standalone, no problems. 2 partitions, 1 with ME and 1 with Win2K ended in destruction...3 times. Never had this problem with 98SE and Win2K.

I no longer run any dual boot systems since I have enough to install anything I want on some PC around the house but found this very odd and worth thinking about before doing it.

Other than that I don't have anything else to say about WinME. I hate it as much as 98 :] Win2K all the way for me (I even prefer NT 4.0...USB is just another damn cable lying about, haha).

[Frost Byte]

I like ME very much and don't like 98se...this is just because ME works very well on my compter. I ahve seen ME not work (that was on a friends compter)...So if your formating i'd say go for ME and if you don't like it...take it off...no harm done...but don't switch form somethig that runs fine to something else...that is risky

[M@€$†®Ö™]

Have to go with Me on this thread as I have in all the others. I had a 35 day uptime before rebooting because of a Hardware Upgrade. I play all the games Q3,UT,CandC, Need for Speed,Viper Raciing, FInal Fantasy, and tons of others with no issues and my ME install is tweaked and hacked like you would not believe :D I have Win2K and its good for stability but I get enough stability from ME at this point. Just my 2 pennies. I get more problems from rogue application coding errors then I do from WinMe. People Blame Me for BSOD when I have been able to see rogue code crash it so in some instances its not a OS issues its a coding issue with games and apps.

Maestro

[oc jason]

My opinion Id say NO- just becasue my xperiances are bad with it -im running 2ooo right now and it is SO stable, and have used XP and it is quite good actually

[lonewolf1983]

im also a win2k fan
but like has been explained on previous threads,it depends on your situation
some older hardware may not work,as may some older programs
but win2k SP2 is as reliable an os as i have found,and runs every bit of my hardware and software.
and ME,lets just say i dont like it
if you dont make the step to win2k,then stick with 98SE for a little longer

[Cisco Kid]

Well it will be a coin toss, plan to format on a Saturday, would be nice to try ME but then again mayby Win 2K may be it. What I am concerned about is USB issues as I have just got a T Bird 1.2 pc266 and an MSI K7T266 Pro w raid ddr board (known to have some USB drop out issues.

So I do not know if Win 2k would make this worse as some of my peripherals such as my Logitech 3000 Pro USB camera has been a bitch with my MSI i815 mobo. I can not get it to work on my desktop and it looks like my last resort will be to format and load this device first. I keep getting "device in use by another application" yet I have removed all USB devices and the software to run them. The web cam works well on my laptop but not on my Desktop. This is the sole reason I am formatting plus upon putting my new rig together I wann start off with an empty bdrive and clean os of some sort. If I can be sure that Win 2K can support UT, Unreal, Quake 3, Nascar, Formula 2000, Diablo 3, NHL 2001, then I will go with it, but I also got to make sure Win 2K will work with my web cam which I am dsure it will. I have fair knowledge of os's but I do not know alot about Win 2K and the tweaks necessary to make certain applications run with it.

I just need to be able to use my San Disk Smart Card Reader USB, and HP P1000 printer parallell or USB as well as my web camera. Any feedback is welcomed. Kinda thinking maybe do Win 98 SE again till XP comes out, just wish it booted to desktop faster......

Cisco Kid

[brianm]

I don't care if you are a tech from dell (no offense ghaz) or if your father is zeus...winme highly depends on the user and his/her hardware. I don't use it because ti runs horribly on my system...so I dual boot win2k/98se. Win2k I use 99% of the time and i just run al games from win98se jsut to save some hassle. :-D
A lot of people run winme great and some dont. It depends on your hradware, software and everything. Just make sure it's compatable.

[M@€$†®Ö™]

Good Luck on the Coin Toss :D

Maestro

[Antithesis]

I've had some bad experience with WinME.
When I worked Quality Assurance, we had several QA machines - with images of most win os (98, 98SE, winME, 2k, 2k server, 2k sp4, xp, xp sp1 and 2k3 server.
and I can honestly tell you, that on all our machines (variety of hardware, motherboards, etc..), winME was known as the one that gives "errors" in our automated tests that no other win OS had... and thats after we had a lot of problems to get the automated test to run on winME in the first place.

Overall, win2k is a much more stable OS, IMHO. It is also not a resource hog, and I've seen it run on older PC's with decent performance. I would recommend for you to check, for all the hardware you have, whether win2k drivers exist - First check with the manufactorer, if not, a good resource is driverguide.com (don't bother signing up... username: driver, password:all ... I kid you not...)
If you can find everything you have, then I would for sure go with win2k..
If not, I would still try... worest case, you waste 2 hours installing and configuring, if things are bad, format and put ME... but I believe if it does work, you will save yourself more than two hours by having a much better OS

Finally, regarding your resource conflict.. its a bit of a hassle, but if you look under the resource tab of the drivers properties.. you can see where the conflict is... uninstall the confliting hardware, and reinstall your camera first... there is a decent chance of this fixing the problem.

[Mr.Guvernment]

ME seems to be a stable O/S if you do not use your computer hardcore - just the basic - web surfing, some email.

of ALL - and yes this is many - experiences myself and people who i have helped with ME - if you plan to really use the O/S | Computer - stick with 98SE or go to 2k and try to run your games with tweaks.

ME is know famously for it's memory leaks if the system is left on for hours on end - not sure if MS ever fixed this.


WinME is nothing but WINdows 98SE with windows 2000 icons slapped on it in a hurry and shipped out the door to keep the "home" users happy since everyone else got Windows 2000.

[stang8118]

Umm why are you bumping a post from 2001??

[Mr.Guvernment]

No idea, i just look at the last post :D

[CrystalMethod]

No idea, i just look at the last post :D


Ummm... Uhhhh.... Anyone got anything else to add about ME vs. 98SE or 2000, or XP, that hasn't already been said in the last four years? :D

[el]

Me crashed all the time. go w2k.

[Gnufsh]

ME is evil! I have only ever had problems with that OS. I prefer linux, 2000, XP, 98se, 98, 95, 3.11, DOS and even memtest86 to ME (they're in the order that I'd rather use them as a primary OS). However, I'm sure Cisco Kid already made hi sdecision. Why wait 3-4 years for my answer?

[stang8118]

When i had ME it was horrible though. Got random BSOD's games ran like crap, then switched to 2000pro and never had a problem since. Then once XP came out my games ran better then ever :D

[Statik]

AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! NNNNNNNNNNNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

ME!!! KILL IT KILL IT KILL IT!!! evil, icky... GET IT AWAY!!!!

haha, but seriously... ME does suck, big time. very unstable and crahes a lot. used to have it on a comp @ my church, crashed all the time. ditched it for 98 (no xp at the time)... go with 2k or xp... depending on personal preference and system abilities (if you got enough to run xp or not...)

[theMonster]

I've never used ME in a home environment but I can say that from my extensive corporate research and testing. It's dog crap. Too many reasons to mention. It's network and ODBC authentication is a gigantic cluster f**k though, is the main reason.

[deathman20]

LOL what is this the second thread resurrected back from 01 about nearly the same issue? LOL

[Antithesis]

I'm afraid I am to blame for this resurrection....

I guess I shouldnt be looking around the forum and replying to a thread when I should really go to sleep... I was just afraid that without intervention, this guy will actually install win ME.... we are in 2005...

anyway.. I've learnt my lesson.

Sorry.

[Gnufsh]

LOL what is this the second thread resurrected back from 01 about nearly the same issue? LOL
I thought this was familiar! This is the old thread about ME vs 2k resurrected recently.

[I.M.O.G.]

ME is evil! I have only ever had problems with that OS. I prefer linux, 2000, XP, 98se, 98, 95, 3.11, DOS and even memtest86 to ME (they're in the order that I'd rather use them as a primary OS). However, I'm sure Cisco Kid already made hi sdecision. Why wait 3-4 years for my answer?

You'd rather run memtest86 as an OS than run ME? LOL :D