Is it any faster?

Test system:

• AMD Athlon 800Mhz
• FIC SD11 Mainboard
• 256MB SDRAM
• Western Digital 20GB HD 7200RPM ATA/66
• Maxtor 10GB HD 7200RPM ATA/66
• Pioneer DVD-114 10x
• Plextor 12/10/32A CD-RW Drive

The simple answer to "is it any faster" this is for the most part no. But it isn't any slower either. Considering that WindowsME is still based on the same Win9x kernel I wouldn't expect it to get any slower. Application speed didn't really increase much from what it had originally been in Win98SE. Game based performance remained much the same as well; program load time was significantly decreased across the board though:

CRASH!

After extensive testing I have come to the conclusion that WindowsME is actually more stable than its predecessor. While I am not saying that WindowsME is on the same level of stability as Windows 2000, far from it, what I am saying is that WindowsME not only crashes less, but also displays easier to understand messages when it does crash.

Am I happy?

The answer to that question is both yes and no. For one, Microsoft really did a good job in making WindowsME much more user-friendly than the previous versions, and they also did a fine job in making it much more stable. On the other hand there just aren't enough new features to justify spending you hard earned $79.99 on, that's why all who want to upgrade from Win98 should do so before January 15th 2001, that's when the $49.99 promotion is over.

by Ryan Wissman

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