Only Window Dressing (Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition)

Member Name: SkyscraperFanClu

Product:	Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
Date:	08/04/09 (19 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: The alternatives to Windows are too impractical; Start - up and shut - down times improved on ME .

Disadvantages: Unstable, frequent crashes, useless multimedia software and add - ons, system utilities still poor .

Microsoft's 2000 home version of Windows - the 'Millennium Edition' offers very little progress over previous versions and can only really be recommended to those using Windows 95 or earlier. The improvements are too small and the added features too trivial to make it a particularly outstanding piece of software.
The bold promise "Let ME Entertain You" - Microsoft's marketing campaign for their 2000 operating system - is hardly justified by the enhanced multimedia features Windows Millennium Edition offers. The most well known of these features is Windows Media Player 7, previous incarnations of which have been rather dull and forgettable. Version 7 promises CD-ripping and MP3-recording capabilities, access to reference media through the Internet, support for a large variety of video and audio formats and extensive visualisation and skinning variations. In short, this is Microsoft's answer to RealVideo and RealJukebox, (both of which can be downloaded free of charge from www.real.com).

Media Player 7 fails in many areas. The MP3 encoding does make use of variable bit-rate technology to deliver a superior quality of sound without making the resulting MP3 file excessively bulky. To be fair, it does this very well - the MP3 sizes it produces are generally slightly larger than typical 128 bit rate MP3s but the sound quality is markedly better for the majority of the time. However it insists frustratingly on encoding the MP3 files so that they are unrecognisable to any player other than Media Player 7, and cannot be distributed via Napster. This is clearly to prevent any litigation from anti-MP3 cases, but as is typical of Microsoft it has been executed in a way that makes documents created with their product incompatible with the products of other manufacturers. But this is only the beginning of Media Player's flaws.
Aesthetically it is unnecessarily large, taking up about a half of the screen even in minimized mode, making it about five times larger than WinAmp. The visualisations - colourful patterns moving to the rhythm of music being played - vary between very good (especially the 'Ambience' ones) to extremely poor (notably the 'Musical Colours' set). Full-screen playback is possible but it can cause the software - and sometimes Windows entirely - to crash. In fact, many, many things make Media Player crash. Importing certain file formats, especially RealVideo ones, makes it crash. Recording MP3 files very often makes it crash. Navigating the online media section while playing a song makes it crash. The crashes usually take the form of .dll (i.e. driver) errors and persist so frequently that the software is unusable. The ideal solution is to uninstall Media Player 7, then go to real.com and get RealPlayer 8 Basic and RealJukebox 8 Basic - they are far more flexible and tend not to crash at all, as proper software should.

While you're at it, get RealDownload 4 as well (or one of the many variations: GoZilla or Download Accelerator), for Microsoft are yet to update their own download software. Yes, in this modern MP3-swapping, Internet video-playing utopia that Microsoft apparently envisage, download utilities that allow you to resume downloading if the connection fails are apparently not necessary. Downloading is a basic necessity of Internet use and it's laughable that in this supposedly multimedia-friendly new version of Windows a decent download program has not been included.
Internet Explorer v5.1 is bundled in but even this is not free from mysterious, unprovoked failures. It is, however, probably the best Internet browser available until Netscape can get Navigator v6 sorted out. It is highly intuitive, flexible and flicks back and forth through pages quickly and efficiently. But, of course, it can be downloaded for free anyway (www.microsoft.com), so having the new version of Explorer isn't really an incentive to purchase Windows ME.

Two more seemingly pointless utilities are included in Windows ME. The first of which is the 'Scanner And Camera Wizard' in the 'Accessories' section. I fail to see the necessity of this utility - such image input hardware as it promises to support are invariably easy to install anyway. Such programmes as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Print House and Paint Shop Pro interface directly with the scanner or camera's software anyway. Having a wizard present to detect these items is a waste of time. That said, when I plugged my scanner in, it remained dormant. I suspect that was a blessing. The second utility is 'Windows Movie Maker', a very limited piece of video editing software that allows you to editing together various pieces of footage and a small number of effects. It is no substitute whatsoever for a dedicated piece of video editing software, and it is far too fiddly to use even for quick editing jobs. The final products can only be saved as Windows Movie Maker Files, and therefore are pretty much useless anyway.
The flashy multimedia face of Windows ME is therefore only superficial - mere window dressing. After the definite improvement in speed and stability that Windows 98 Second Edition brought I hoped for impressive feats from the new version. The truth was in fact quite disappointing.

Let's begin with the good news at least - Windows ME does improve start-up and shutdown times considerably. It does so by a notable margin, too - you won't need to get a stopwatch out and measure the two to notice the difference. As with Windows of old, though, adding start-up programmes such as virus checkers slows times markedly. Nonetheless the signs are good.
The promises of better stability, however, are utter nonsense. If anything Windows ME crashes more frequently than its' predecessor which is frankly unacceptable. It frequently hangs while trying to shutdown, and more often than not fails to shutdown entirely and displays the message 'Windows Protection Error - Please Restart Your Computer'. Windows ME is little more comfortable at multitasking than its' predecessors - attempts to run more than two or three programmes at once (my usual combination is Microsoft Outlook, RealPlayer, Word and Norton AntiVirus) cause endless problems usually resulting in crashing or programmes failing due to mysterious .dll errors.

The standard system utilities are decidedly lacking in power. Scandisk now runs under Windows at start-up, which is an improvement, but the software itself is no better. Indeed Scandisk and Disk Defragmenter seem to work in an irritating pass-the-buck system where Scandisk claims data problems require Disk Defragmenter to run before Scandisk can be used, but Disk Defragmenter blames disk surface errors and won't run until Scandisk has fixed them. Another peculiar issue is that Windows consistently claims that I am using more space on my hard drive even after I've deleted several large files. Norton Utilities can sort these problem out, but you shouldn't have to spend £59.99 on buying software which should come as standard with an operating system and function correctly.
The desktop remains very similar to that introduced with Windows 95. The start menu has been tidied up a little bit, and deleting icons gives a beginner-friendly warning that this action will not delete the programme itself. In general, however, the desktop has hardly changed at all from Windows 98 to Windows ME.

Windows Millennium Edition is really not worth upgrading to if you have either version of Windows 98. Though it does run notably faster than previous versions of Windows in certain areas, the frequent and inexplicable crashes suffered only waste more time anyway. The additional software is generally either useless or, like Media Player 7 and Internet Explorer 5.1, can be downloaded free of charge from the Internet.
Perhaps realising that Windows ME is a worthless upgrade for Windows 98 users, Microsoft are selling a Windows 98-only upgrade for £42.99 (www.reserve.co.uk). I strongly advise against taking them up on this offer - it is a complete waste of money. Upgrades from other versions of Windows cost £74.99 and are worthwhile for the greater Plug-And-Play and USB support that came with Windows 98. Windows Millennium Edition is hardly the operating system for the 21st century that Microsoft would have us believe. It is volatile, unreliable and offers little real improvement over previous versions.

Summary: Only Window Dressing

Variety of features:
Reliability:
User friendly: