Windows ME

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.

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.