Not worth the time and effort (Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition)

Member Name: poet831

Product:	Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
Date:	12/04/09 (37 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: None - not happy with this at all

Disadvantages: keeps freezing up, not compatible with a lot of other hardware or programmes

Seems I'm not as impressed by this as some of the other reviewers. Unfortunately, it was installed in our brand new computer ...and I had misgivings as soon as I realised that. I remembered all the hassles we'd had with a beta version of Windows 95 all those years ago. My husband tried to offer reassurance and uttered words of comfort in my ear. Things were so far advanced now, they've been doing this so long, they KNOW what they're doing. In fact, I agree with that last sentence. Oh yes! They know what they're doing!
Well, things went wrong from the time we took it out of the box. We put it together and set about installing our printer and scanner. nope! It will not take my printer. It TELLS US it has, and it will do the tests for alignment BUT try to print from a screen in the wordprocessor or on the net - tough! Nothing happens! You can forget it! Poor hubby was not purring as sweetly after his fifth call to the Lexmark support team. I think both he and they were fast getting more than frazzled. All of the Lexmark employees spoken to said there had been numerous problems with Windows ME since it came out. WindowsME had only been released to them the day before it was available for customers, so they'd had no time to check it with their products or make any adjustments. No joy.

We then installed my Compuserve. From the start, it kept freezing up. Sometimes we'd only be halfway through logging in and it would jam, other times it was as we were surfing, or e-mailing. I was getting exceedingly unhappy. Hubby, he with the technical know-how, called Compuserve - I think they were getting to know him pretty well, almost on first-name terms, he had to call so much. They had him try all sorts of things; nothing seemed to work and he'd be calling back five minutes later. Compuserve, like Lexmark also said they'd had countless calls from customers who had the new ME version of Windows, and again Microsoft had only issued them their ME information a day or so before it was out for the public to use. My husband ended up refreshing the system back to a day before the first jams started. That seemed to work.
Now, even as he was calling Lexmark and Compuserve he was attempting to contact Microsoft about the problems we were experiencing. That was when I got totally ticked off, and realised there might be some kind of a scam going on behind the scenes here. It seems that if you have 3.1, or 95/98, you can get technical help for free BUT for WindowsME? Uh-uh! You had better have that credit card ready because it's going to cost you! That made me about to blow my stack, and I ranted to poor hubby that it was OBVIOUS that Microsoft KNEW there were problems with ME and banked on people needing tech support to deal with it. What a rip off! And if it's pre-installed in a new computer, you're stuck with it unless you want to go through the hassle of uninstalling and then buying 95/98. Believe me, I was NOT a happy camper. I was threatening to sue Microsoft! Well, what do you think when all other tech support is free and all of a sudden you've got to pay an exorbitant amount for help where their programme is messing everything up?

It's not as if I have a load of programmes that I've installed. I have my Compuserve and Corel WordPerfectSuite 7, plus what was already in there. That's it. I even installed Webroot Washer so's I'm not adding junk in my memory from all the cookies you get. Cost me $29.95 from www.webroot.com - best thirty bucks I've spent, I think. They'll give you a free 30 day trial, it is WELL worth checking out. Since then, I get less jams. Unfortunately, it can't help with the printer problem though which is why my old cpu sits under my monitor, attached to the scanner and printer, with keyboard and mouse attached and down the side of my computer desk. When I need to print anything, I have to save it to disk, hubby then has to swap the monitor from the new computer to the old, I have to swap keyboards and mouses (or should that be mice) and do it that way. It's a lot of blooming palaver to achieve what used to be such a simple task - click on print and away you go.
I did feel Bill Gates got a rough deal with all that Monopoly stuff in the US court system and can't help but wonder if this is some kind of protest on his part. I'm wondering if he did this as a kind of retribution? But if anyone else considers suing Microsoft about all these problems, let me know. Maybe a class action suit is what we need to make them fix the glitches. After all, this is not a beta programme - it's supposed to be fully operational. As for me with ME - I think it was over-hyped and definitely NOT up

Summary: Not worth the time and effort

Variety of features:
Reliability:
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