Windows ME?!? *shudders at the thought*

Well, alot of people have said that 98se it the way to go. I completely agree. The ME OS is basically a bloated 98 anyway. Some of the differences between 98 and ME are as follows:

  • The Windows ME operating system has a new upgraded system protections (ya right)
  • The M$ Sytem restore automatically updates and backs up the registry and other system files when the system is idle, about every 10 hours of up-time. This same feature also doesn't allow the user to delete critical system files. (okay, A program screwed up the registry with out me knowing about two days ago. Can i revert back to it? Nope, The OS has already re-backed itself up with the bad registry like 6 times by now. Good job M$.)
  • System File protection: If you delete anything in the Programs Folder, Windows ME will make a compressed image of the deleted files, just in case you need them again. It will also prevent older programs from writing over newer .dll files. (not always a good thing, what happens if one was a non-standard .dll and is corrupt? BSOD!)
  • Boot to DOS? Nope, don't think so. You can use a VDM (virtual dos machine), but its very limited. You also can't use any 16-bit device drivers for older games. The autoexec.bat and config.sys files are obsolete now and don't allow any drivers, TSR's or any other USEFUL things to be loaded.


Well, those are just a few of the changes with the ME Operating system. Some others are more help options and more description boxes.

As far as games are involved, I would suggest using 98se. Win2k and XP are also good to use, but as others have said, they won't allow older DOS games to play. The reason? Older DOS games were written to have sole use of all the hardware resources and wanted to control them directly. In the true 32-bit OS's like win2k, NT, and XP this is an absolute no no. This is one of the reasons they are som much more stable. They don't allow ANY program to access the hardware directly. Everything goes through the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer)

Well, I hope this helped clear up WHY ME blows.

xmaddness