Windows
ME (Millennium Edition) is the next upgrade to Win 98. Targeted at home
users, it contains many nifty bells and whistles. We checked out the second
beta of the operating system. The third one has recently been released.
Whether ME will be faster and more stable than its older cousins remains to
be seen. However, it has many new features.
Installation
We used a
PIII/450 with 64 MB RAM and 30 GB HDD for the tests. The maximum hard drive
real estate required by Windows ME is about 130 MB more than Win 98.
The setup is quite similar to
that of Win 9x. Complete installation of the OS took three reboots. However,
it was completely automated, and required minimal user input. Copying of
files took just 10 minutes–the rest was used in detecting the hardware and
setting the regional settings, etc. Millennium’s desktop content remains
the same, but the corresponding icons have changed. The OS took almost half
a minute longer than its earlier counterparts to boot up.
Windows Compared |
|||
Operating System |
Installation time |
Boot-up time |
Typical install size |
(Minutes) |
(seconds) |
(MB) |
|
Win 98 | 15 | 44 | 340 |
Windows ME (Beta 2) | 23 | 75 | 471 |
Farewell, real mode
This
was the mode in which applications could be run in a pure DOS environment.
It has been removed from Windows ME. According to Microsoft, real mode was
responsible for many system crashes, and slowed down the booting process.
Therefore, in Win ME you can’t boot in DOS mode. All
you get is a DOS shell that can be accessed through Windows. Applications
that required you to shutdown into DOS mode, or boot into it, can’t be run
now.
Applications that modify
autoexec.bat to run themselves are in for a surprise too. Any changes made
to the default autoexec.bat file are removed as soon as the system is
rebooted.
System file protection
Almost all
Windows users would, at some point of time, have erased a system file by
mistake. With Win 9x, the only solution would be to go in for a complete
re-install, which one must admit, isn’t the best possible solution. Thus,
in Windows ME, the system prevents you from deleting these files, or even if
you do manage to delete them, it restores these files from its backup
copies.
To test this feature, we
tried deleting as many DLLs from the system directory as we could. About 80
percent of the DLLs were successfully deleted. At this point, one might
expect the system to become unstable. However, to our surprise, Millennium
rebooted without any problem and actually recovered all the critical DLLs
required for its functioning.
System restore
If you
install a program that seriously messes up your Windows configuration, the
system restore tool returns your registry to a time when your PC ran fine.
This feature works automatically, saving a restore snapshot every 24 hours
or after 10 hours of continuous running, whichever comes first. In the beta,
we found that there was no way of taking snapshots manually. You would have
to wait for the specified period before being able to do the restore. Thus,
if a rogue application ruins your registry, you may have to restore the
registry to the point whenever Millennium took the screenshot last. As a
result, any software that you installed after that would also become
dysfunctional. Maybe, this problem will be taken care of in the final
release.
Built-in
compression/decompression
Even better
in our opinion, are the built-in data compression codecs. ZIP and CAB are
now built into Windows Explorer. Compressed files show up as folders,
instead of individual files, and you can explore the ZIP file like any other
directory. It also features on-the-fly decompression, and you don’t need
to decompress the whole archive to make use of any of the internal files. To
compress files, you simply have to use the "Send to" option to
send them into a compressed folder.
Bundled IE
Our beta
version came bundled with IE 5.5. We didn’t find any striking new features
compared to the current version–IE 5. It does boast of having better
support for Dynamic HTML, Java, and the Channel Definition Format (CDF)
though.
Games!
Microsoft’s
games, which come with Windows, have remained the same ever since the days
of Win 95. With Millennium, seven new games have been introduced, five of
which–Checkers, Hearts, and Backgammon, for example–are meant to be
played against other people over the Net using MSN Gaming Zone. Much to our
dismay, we were unable to connect to their servers. Perhaps they aren’t
functional yet, as the Millennium’s still in Beta. Guess we’ll have to
wait for the final version to arrive.
Beta 2 came bundled with the
latest version of DirectX—that is, 7.1. Also featured in ME is DirectPlay
Voice Chat. This lets you chat with other gamers as you play over the
Internet. Though a neat feature, it isn’t yet supported by any of the
current games in the market.
Final words
One thing
that took us by shock was support for networking in Millennium. It’s
removed all other clients but the ones for Microsoft networks. So if you
want to log onto a NetWare network using Millennium, be ready to install the
Novell Client 32. Support for all third party protocols like Banyan, IBM,
Novell has also been removed. Only those supported by Microsoft existed in
the network configuration.
As we were going to press, we
came across a news item, according to which Microsoft, due to a number of
complaints from vendors as well as users, has decided to include support for
Banyan and Novell network clients.
We were expecting a more
drastic change in Millennium over 98, but till now it seems more like a new
service release. Overall, the good side is that we faced minimal problems
with Millennium, though it’s still a Beta. It ran smoothly, and even
handled sudden power cuts, etc, that we threw at it rather beautifully.