98SE to ME, worth it? Plus other various psycho babble

[mooncricket]

I've heard the usual good/bad, nothing really specific though. Some guy on another forum said ME was noticable faster in boot up time and running games, etc. If anyone cares to add anything helpful it would be great.
Also, what's this about no dos?
And what's the word bloating supposed to mean? Keep hearing ppl say it, and I have no idea what they mean.

Lastly about Win2k, alright it's not a gaming OS, it's for business. What kinda programs do businesses run on it? What, like photoshop, or those other $500+ programs?

 

[MGMorden]

What people mean by bloating is that the company has add more "features" which increases the amount of code and results in larger and slower executables. It's an efficiency problem that's getting pretty bad nowadays. As far as the DOS and WinME, you're right they took it out. You can't dumpt out to pure DOS and they don't even give you a dos prompt selection under start. I uninstalled it a while back b/c it wasn't working right with my Novell Netware login software, but I guess it might be possible to use an external command interface if you needed it (such as the FreeDOS command.com). My overall impression of WinMe was that it looked like Win2k but ran like Win98 (a bad thing). I liked Win2k muhc better, since it seemed to run noticeably faster and was more stable (driver support isn't as good though).

 

[Ladi]

ME doesn't have 'pure' DOS, but does have some dos functionality. If you really need it - format/fdisk/etc - that's what DOS boot disks are for

Win2K is not a 'gaming OS' but that doesn't mean it's terrible for games. If mature drivers exist for your hardware, the vast majority of games DO run,and run well, under Win2K and those that don't probably aren't worth your time anyways Keep in mind that entirely mature drivers don't exist yet for ME either. Business applications general refers to office apps (word procs, spreadsheets, databases, etc), development apps (for coding, for creating multimedia content, etc), and the like, as opposed to games, media players/viewers, etc.

~Ladi

 

[JellyBaby]

To fully reap the rewards of the "faster boot time" marketing dot you need a mainboard that supports the upcoming fast boot standard. I don't believe these exist yet.

Win ME drops dos but from what I hear it isn't as stable as Win 98SE and is a bit slower for Windows apps. Go figure.

The only benefit I see are the file protection and health features. Maybe this will be the first gaming OS that won't need a reinstall every 4 months for those of us who install/uninstall a lot of stuff.

Anyway, for $109 there's not much to get excited about. It's really Win 98 Third Edition and if priced like SE I would probably snatch it up after the first service pack is released. But $109...hmmmm...I think not.

 

[negative]

I Use winME release version(ok, i warezed it, sue me) and It DOES boot much faster than 98, games run the same for me, and ME is much more stable for me... ive been running it for about 2 weeks and i havnt gotten a single BSOD.. pretty impressive..
btw my current uptime is around 4 days, and no memory leaks.. but if you do get em.. just logoff and log back on (dont gotta reboot)

 

[negative]

to stop any questions i also might get..
yes it is the release version that will be sent to stores and OEMs

 

[bonkers325]

winme is suck
win98se is much better
guess i have to just download windows media player 7 and ie5.5