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Windows Me (IPA pronunciation: ), also known as Windows Millennium Edition is a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit graphical operating system released on September 14, 2000 by Microsoft. It was originally codenamed Millennium.
Windows Me
Overview
New and updated features
Criticisms
Relation to other Windows releases
System requirements
| | Name | Windows Me | | Family | Microsoft Windows | | Logo | Windows Me logo.gif | | Screenshot | WindowsME.png
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Overview
A successor to Windows 95 and Windows 98, it was marketed as a "Home Edition" when compared to Windows 2000 which had been released seven months earlier. It provided Internet Explorer 5.5, Windows Media Player 7, and the new Windows Movie Maker software, which provided basic video editing and was designed to be easy for home users. Both Internet Explorer 5.5 and Windows Media Player 7 could also be downloaded for free from the Internet for previous versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft also updated the graphical user interface in Windows Me with some of the features that were first introduced in Windows 2000. Unlike the "Home" edition of Windows XP which would replace Windows Me a year later, Windows Me is not built on the Windows NT architecture of Microsoft's professional operating system at the time. Windows Me is an MS-DOS based version like its predecessors but with access to real mode MS-DOS restricted for faster system boot time. This was one of the most publicized changes in Windows Me because applications that needed real mode DOS to run (such as older disk utilities) would not run under the Windows Me operating system.
Windows Me had the shortest shelf-life of all the Windows Operating Systems (about one year), and was soon replaced by Windows XP, which was launched on October 25, 2001. Incidentally, Windows XP has had the longest shelf-life of all the Windows Operating Systems (just over five years), until Windows Vista is released for public use in (projected) February 2007.
In 2006, PCWorld declared Windows Me the fourth "Worst Tech Product of All Time" (after AOL, RealPlayer, and Syncronys SoftRAM) * because of its technical issues.
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New and updated features
System Restore: Windows Me introduced the "System Restore" logging and reversion system, which was meant to simplify troubleshooting and solving problems. It was intended to work as a "safety net" so that if the installation of an application or a driver adversely affected the system, the user could undo the install and return the system to a previously-working state. It did this by monitoring changes to Windows system files and the registry (System Restore is not a backup program). System Restore could slow the computer's performance if it chose to checkpoint the system while a user was using it, and since its method of keeping track of changes was fairly simplistic, it sometimes ended up restoring a virus which the user had previously removed.
Universal Plug and Play: Windows Me was Microsoft's first operating system to introduce support for Universal Plug and Play, often shortened to UPnP.
Windows Image Acquisition: Windows Me also introduced the Windows Image Acquisition API for a standardized and officially supported method of allowing Windows applications to transparently and more easily communicate with image acquisition devices, such as digital cameras and scanners. Before Windows Me and the introduction of WIA, non-standard third party solutions were often common here, leading to incompatibility problems.
Automatic Updates: The Automatic Updates utility automatically downloads and installs critical updates from the Windows Update Web site with little user interaction. It is set up to check Windows Update once every 24 hours by default. Users can choose to download which update that they want, although high-priority updates must be downloaded and installed.
System File Protection: First introduced with Windows 2000 (as Windows File Protection), and expanding on the capabilities introduced with System File Checker in Windows 98, System File Protection aimed to protect system files from modification and corruption silently and automatically. When the file protection was in effect, replacing a system file that had no file lock preventing it to be overwritten caused Windows to immediately and silently restore the original copy. The original would then be taken from a hard drive backup folder or from the Windows Me installation CD if none were found on the default locations searched by Windows. If no such CD would be in the drive, a dialog box would alert the user about the problem and request that the CD be inserted. The same procedures took place if a system file was deleted instead of replaced.
Windows File Protection is an entirely different technology from System Restore. System Restore maintains a broad set of changed files including added applications and user configuration data stored repeatedly at specific points in time restored by the user. Windows File Protection only protects operating system files with no user input.
Windows File Protection uses version 2.5 of the Microsoft Data Access Components technology.
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Criticisms
Microsoft's removal of non-plug-and-play drivers on the Windows Me installation CD led to further confusion when many older modems, soundcards and network cards appeared not to be supported as they were after a Windows 98 installation. • In many cases, this could be remedied by manually installing the proper driver(s). However, not all hardware vendors provided proper Me compatible drivers, especially for older hardware, which increased Me's reputation as a problem OS.
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Relation to other Windows releases
Windows Me was complemented by Windows NT-based Windows 2000, which was aimed at professional users. Both operating systems were succeeded by Windows XP with their features combined. Along with Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE, Microsoft discontinued support for Windows Me on July 11, 2006. Microsoft now no longer provides any phone support or security updates for these products because Microsoft considers them outdated.•
At the time of its release, many third-party applications written for earlier editions of Microsoft Windows, especially older games, ran under Windows Me but not under Windows 2000. This fact has become less relevant with the sharp decline in popularity of Windows Me after the release of Windows XP, which features a compatibility mode which allows many of these older applications to run.
Also unlike Windows 2000, Windows Me does not have a back up utility installed by default, but it is available on the Windows Me CD.
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System requirements
Minimum system requirements of Windows Millennium Edition are a 150 MHz Pentium or compatible processor, 320 megabytes of free hard drive space and at least 32 megabytes of RAM.• Recommended system requirements are a Pentium II 300 MHz with at least 96 megabytes of RAM.
However, it is possible to sidestep the artificial minimum MHz limitation by using the undocumented "/nm" switch when starting Setup.
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