Windows Millennium and Beyond

Windows Me

What it is: the latest -- and last -- version of "Windows for Consumers," built upon the same 16- and 32-bit code-base as Windows 98.

When: Beta 2 was distributed to a closed group of beta testers in early Dec. '99. Beta 3 and a release candidate were distributed in Apr. 2000. The final version (identified onscreen as build 3000) was released to manufacturers on June 19th and will became officially available for retail sale on Sept. 14th. (As of mid-Aug, some stores were already selling Windows Me with new machines.)

Why: Microsoft aims to improve the out-of-box, multimedia and online experiences for PC consumers. (And, of course, there's also the "cash-grab" factor.)

Minimum requirements: 150MHz Pentium PC, 32MB RAM, 320MB storage, CD-ROM drive. Certain features, such as the Windows Movie Maker, have higher hardware requirements. (See Microsoft's list of system requirements for further details.)

Pricing: The Canadian price of Windows Me is $309 for the full version and $169 for the upgrade edition (which differs from the full release only in that it requires the presence of a prior Microsoft OS release). Windows 3.x and Windows 95 owners are not eligible for a (limited time, now unavailable) $84.99 promo and have to pay C$169 for the upgrade.

Elliot Katz, Consumer Marketing Manager of Microsoft Canada's Windows division says there is no "grace period" for purchasers of Windows 98 prior to the release of Windows Me. In the past, some Microsoft products sold in the time period immediately preceding a new release were accompanied by a coupon allowing purchasers a free upgrade. Alas, Microsoft says it is not offering such a program this time around. Katz also confirmed that Windows 98 will no longer be available as a retail product after existing stock runs out. However, he says, original equipment manufacturers ("OEMs") may continue to offer Windows 98 if their customers demand it.

According to Microsoft, Windows Me (short for "Windows Millennium Edition") focuses on the "out of the box" experience, providing improvements in home networking, multimedia, CD audio, digital video, Internet connectivity, and improvements to the online experience. Although Millennium Edition shares some user interface features with Windows 2000, it is not based on the Windows NT code base that is at the heart of Windows 2000. This means that Windows Me does not support multiple CPUs or the sort of robust memory architecture that makes Windows NT and 2000 much more resilient to crashes than Windows 9x. Thus, Windows Me, despite what was said during the hype surrounding the Windows 95 rollout, remains based on a significant amount of 16-bit code (which is actually good for compatibility). Compatibility with real-mode DOS apps, however, is reduced, for the simple reason that Microsoft has disabled the ability to boot to a command line prompt, at least without the use of a bootable floppy. Worse, third-party utilities that require a bootable floppy may no longer work unless they include their own copy of DOS. More on this later.

Fortunately, a number of the system maintenance features present in Windows 2000 (and/or, in a few cases, the Plus Pack for Windows 98) have been moved downstream to Windows Me, including an improved, extensible Help system, "personalized" menus and improvements to both networking configuration and the online experience.

One of the key new features is an enhanced version of the Media Player that supports the CDDB system for providing artist, album, and song names from an online (or installed) database, plus enhancements for cataloguing and opening a wide variety of audio and video formats on your system or downloaded from the Net.

Tip: If you find, as we did, that Media Player 7.0 doesn't play your digital video files as smoothly as the older Media Player did, you'll be happy to know that "MPLAYER2.EXE" (also known as Media Player 6.4) is still there. You'll find it in the "Windows Media Player" folder (usually in the C:\Program Files directory). Thus, if you want to go back to that version just re-associate your video formats to this player and it will be your new default media player in Win Me. You can do this by right-clicking a movie file, choosing "Open With..." and browsing to the MPLAYER2.EXE file in the above-noted directory. Click the "Always use this program to open these files" checkbox to set it as your new default.

Another key benefit of Windows Me is a system file protection feature that essentially makes it impossible to delete critical system files (e.g., important DLLs in the system folder). Interestingly, you actually can delete them, but the the system transparently restores them and keeps on running.

There's also a System Restore feature that is probably the best justification for an upgrade. If disaster strikes your PC (and it always seems to, sooner or later!), you can simply run a program called "System Restore." It walks you through a very simple procedure that allows you to choose a "checkpoint" from a calendar, the most recent date prior to the disaster. You then click Next and the system goes about its magic. After a few minutes, the source of your problem has been removed, the Registry restored and you're back in business. Best of all, any documents you've saved prior to this "rollback" are not deleted. DOC, XLS, PDF and other common file types, along with the contents of your Documents folders, are ignored by the System Restore function.

System Restore takes about 200 MB of disk space. The restore function's "checkpoints" are created both automatically and manually.

A checkpoint is installed:

1. When you install Windows Me.
2. Every 10 hours the computer is on.
3. Every 24 hours.
4. On demand.
5. When applications are installed by the standard Windows installer or InstallShield 6.1 or newer.

Make no mistake about it. System Restore is the best reason to install Windows Me. If you've ever needed to reinstall Windows or fiddled around with a computer trying to figure why it stopped working properly, you'll love this feature.

This "PC Health" feature is further extended by the Windows Update similar to that provided by Windows 98 and 2000. By selecting to be automatically notified of "critical updates," Windows Me will transparently download required items in the background every time your computer is idle and connected to the Internet. When a download is complete, a dialog pops up telling you that an update is available. If you turn off your machine before it is completely downloaded, it simply resumes the next time you connect. Neat!

Windows Me is even stronger than its predecessors in "plug and play" prowess. The OS supports more than 15,000 devices out of the box and virtually every software title or device driver that isn't currently compatible (a small number of utilities from Symantec, QuarterDeck, McAfee, and a few other companies have problems due to the removal of "real mode" support and/or the "system file protection" feature that protects DLLs against accidental replacement) is likely to be updated in the near future.

There's a Net Time Service feature that automatically keeps your system's clock in sync with other machines, and the Internet Sharing feature that first appeared in Windows 98 SE and Windows 2000. Millennium Edition also includes Internet Explorer 5.5 (differing from the freely downloadable version for Windows 9x/2000 only in its "build" number), which includes among its improvements a print preview function.

What to expect: Windows Me has a few new features, numerous improvements with regards to multimedia and system maintenance, and most of the user interface refinements of Windows 2000 bolted onto Windows 98SE. These improvements include:

• Media Player 7. This enhanced version of Microsoft's audio and video player, with its brushed aluminum motif (apparently inspired by the look of Apple's QuickTime 4 player), allows you to download videos or music from the Internet, copy music from CDs, organize various media types according to album, artist or genre, arrange songs into playlists, tune into Internet radio stations and transfer tunes to portable digital music players. It features a customizable interface, graphic equalizer (shown below in one of the Player's customizable "skins") and provides video image quality controls for full-screen or in-a-window video playback. The player can also display dancing graphics while your music plays.
• Personalized Menus: Menus that automatically hide infrequently used items and promote frequently accessed commands to more prominent placement. (Hidden items can be displayed with a click, or this feature can be disabled if desired.)
• A PC Health feature that displays an icon in your system tray and recommends action to help keep your system in top form. In the example shown here, the system notes a low disk space condition.
• A "System Restore" feature automatically logs all changes and allows you to "roll back" the system to a previous state. This feature requires at least 200 MB of free disk space.
• A new "sculptured metal" visual interface for the system's DVD player. (The player, unfortunately, didn't support our systems' ATI Rage Fury or Creative Labs Encore Dxr2 PC-DVD decoder cards.)
• A new Microsoft Movie Maker application that captures video or imports AVI, ASF, and WAV files (etc.) and automatically breaks scenes into different film clips, allowing easy editing. There's also a "Snip" button, allowing manual edits at any point.
• A "My Pictures" folder that allows saved images to be viewed as a slideshow, zoomed, printed, rotated, etc.
• DirectPlay Voice setup to help you configure a microphone for use with speech or Internet telephony applications.
• Refinements to the Find command, including a right-click option to "Open containing folder" and the ability to search a drive by right-clicking and selecting "Search..."
• A new Scanner and Camera Wizard, with significantly improved TWAIN drivers -- now roughly equivalent to the capabilities of stand-alone scanner drivers. Microsoft says there are already more than 100 cameras and scanners that are compatible with a feature the company called Windows Image Acquisition. With WIA, these devices can connect and download images to a computer running Windows Me with no additional software or drivers required. For example, a consumer could take an off-the-shelf Kodak DC280 camera, snap a few pics, connect the camera to the PC via its Universal Serial Bus connector and immediately transfer the pictures to a Windows editor for editing, rotating and saving. There's also a "slide show" mode and the ability to easily delete and manage pictures on the camera.
• A number of new Internet-enabled games, including Reversi, Spades, Backgammon, Checkers, Hearts and -- yes -- a new Solitaire.
• Additional customization capabilities for the taskbar and Start menu.
• Built-in support for Zip archives. (But we still prefer WinZip.)
• Command-line history.
• Improved Help. Interestingly, Help is now country-specific. When you choose your country during installation, this information is passed on to the help system. Thus, Canadians will see Microsoft Canada help topics and contact information when they select Help from the Start Menu or press F1.
• A simplified Control Panel.
• Some subtle improvements. For example, the system now opens text files larger than 32K in WordPad automatically if you attempt to open them in Notepad.
• Windows Me is also the first OS release from Microsoft to feature an implementation of UPnP ("Universal Plug n Play"). This new specification allows connected devices to announce their feature-set to a UPnP-compliant OS, facilitating better device connectivity and smoother interoperability. Microsoft admits that the Windows Me implementation of this feature isn't the ultimate fruition of this technology. Apparently, we will have to wait for "Whistler" (see below) for a more complete implementation. There aren't many UPnP devices out there yet (a smart fridge from GE is apparently one of the first), so we'll have to wait to see how useful this feature actually is.
• Some DOS-related features, unfortunately, have been "downgraded." Notably, Windows Me no longer supports DOS Real Mode.
• Another notable change is the complete absence of the "Internet Tools" category in the Add/Remove Programs control panel. Among other things, the Personal Web Server is nowhere to be found on the CD. However, this is apparently not a ploy to spur sales of Microsoft's server-oriented operating systems; the PWS 4.0 code can still be downloaded from www.microsoft.com.
• Another feature you're not likely to see in Windows Me is the Hibernate function. This feature almost never worked properly when we installed the OEM version on various PCs during our tests of various beta versions over the past several months. Now, reveals Nicolas Coudière, Chief Product Manager for Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition, this feature's been removed from retail versions entirely. (ActiveWin.com has details.)

Tip: To successfully install the Personal Web Server on Windows Me, use the "custom" installation option and change the destination directory to c:\mts instead of c:\program files\mts. If you do not do this, you will see a variety of error message as the system attempts to register MTS components, including "Sysocmgr has caused an error in <unknown>," followed by an error in MTXEX.DLL and other errors as the system attempts to load the Transaction Server core components.

At the Streaming Media West '99 show in Dec. 1999, Gates demonstrated some features from a beta version of Windows Me, including a feature that will be bundled with the OS, dubbed Windows Movie Maker. The software takes video and automatically separates it into segments for editing based on pauses on the tape and scene changes. With it, users can drag and drop scenes they want onto a "storyboard" representing the final edited version, which can then be sent over the Internet. Gates also showed an intriguing capability of the software. With it, he was able to easily take out pauses in a speech and catalogue changes in a presentation, enabling users to skip directly to specific segments of an event.

The Movie Maker is no threat to high-end applications such as Adobe Premiere and its ilk; Movie Maker can dissolve from one clip to another and can mix audio from a video segment with an audio clip or voice-over narration. However, it doesn't support titles or the ability to fade to black at the end of a scene. However, you can load in bitmaps created in other applications. Thus, you can make titles there.

Tip: If you want a fade-out effect, simply create a blank black (or white, etc.) bitmap in a program such as the included "Paint" or "Imaging" application. Drag this image into your movie, arrange it so that it overlaps your final scene and save. the video will dissolve to this bitmap.Perhaps the weakest aspect of Movie Maker is the fact that it saves only in Microsoft's proprietary WMV format. Thus, the movies you produce in Movie Maker aren't going to be compatible with most other Windows video editing apps. Worse, Microsoft has a patent on the file format and has reportedly threatened authors of WMV-to-AVI translation tools with legal action, making third-party solutions to this problem difficult to obtain. Faced with legal pressure, the author of VirtualDub, for example, says he has been forced to drop support for the WMV/ASF format he developed by reverse-engineering Microsoft's code. Look for version 1.3c or earlier of the VirtualDub program for ASF-to-AVI conversion capabilities.

But our vote for klutziest aspect of the new upgrade is the new Zip archive support. It's great to have built-in support for Zip archives, but just wait until you have ten or twnty Zip files to extract at once and you'll appreciate the power of shareware and commercial alternatives WinZip or WinAce. WinME's Zip function pauses after each and every file with a dialog box asking you where you want to put the results. Oh well; it's adequate for occasional use.

Another notable change is Microsoft's new support policies for Windows. Starting with the Sept. 14th  launch of Windows Me, Windows 98, 2000, Me and Office users will get only two free "incidents," as opposed to the 90 days of unlimited free support previously offered. Additional support costs money. (Windows 95 support will move exclusively to this "paid-only assistance model.")

Although it is safe to say that Microsoft is working on eliminating 16-bit "legacy" code from the Windows code base entirely, the Millennium Edition project is not the grand culmination of this effort. It will, however, finally eliminate some of the so-called real-mode code that has long been criticized as a holdover from DOS that lowers the reliability and performance of Windows 95 and 98. In essence, it retains the drawbacks of its DOS legacy, but, for the first time in a Windows 9x product, hides them from the user. There is still a command line, but it, like the scandisk utility and some other previously DOS-mode utilities, now runs inside the Windows environment.

Microsoft has already confirmed a number of other minor bugs in Windows Me. See our report on Troubleshooting Windows Me for further details.

Neptune/Odyssey > Whistler

Neptune is the code-name of what was to be the first Consumer OS based on the NT Kernel. However, reports from WindowPlanet (www.windowplanet.net) and other sources suggest Neptune, originally expected to hit the market somewhere around 2001, now seems to be a cancelled project. Recent Neptune betas were based closely on Windows 2000 (in one of the last "pre-beta" versions, a look at the System Properties tab revealed the product ID to be "Microsoft Windows 2000 5.00.5111 NTC"). Still, from a look at these early builds and Microsoft's pre-release documentation, one can see the general direction in which the OS is (or, rather, was) headed. At the time of its cancellation, plans for the Neptune OS called for a new feature known as "Activity centers" -- essentially, Wizard-driven help modules for accomplishing specific tasks. This, it seems, was the main UI change.

Reportedly, Jan. 2000 saw plans for Neptune combined with a planned "business OS" successor to Windows 2000 known as Odyssey, resulting in a project subsequently known as Whistler, and finally renamed Windows XP. This, it seems, is destined be the client-side successor to Windows 2000 for consumers and business users. (A separate product known as Windows.NET Server will succeed Windows 2000 on the server side.) As with Windows 2000 and NT before it, Whistler will be made available in several versions, ranging from a consumer-targeted "Home" edition to a more network-savvy "Pro" version and even a 64-bit workstation-oriented configuration. Some features first seen in the Neptune betas and other Microsoft OS efforts, of course, have been carried forward. There is an updated version of the PC Health feature from Millennium -- a feature we fully expect to see migrate to whatever the final OS release becomes. Another feature originally seen in Neptune is a welcome screen with a listing of users, designed to enhance the multi-user prowess of Microsoft's next-gen OS. According to recent reports on betanews.com, one of the most obvious changes in the OS is its planned support for alternate "visual styles" -- essentially, optional "skins" that can subtly or radically alter your system's look and feel. (Our Whistler preview has additional details.)

Beyond Whistler, Microsoft says it is working to address the issue of complexity, with a post-Whistler version of the Windows operating system code-named "Blackcomb" -- named after another famous B.C.-based mountain. However, in July 2001, eWeek reported that Microsoft was considering pushing back the release of Blackcomb in favour of an interim release known as Windows 'Longhorn'. (Longhorn, incidentally, is a tavern in the Whistler area.) Indeed, by Nov. 2001, the company's original 2002 target for Blackcomb had been pushed back to 2005 .

As these screenshots suggest, Microsoft is moving away from rectangular windows with its latest systems, favouring instead irregularly shaped windows similar to that seen in Media Player 8 for Windows XP (and, thanks to hackers, for Windows 2000 as well). Read more....

Next-gen Interfaces

On Jan. 12th, 2000, Bill Gates stepped down as CEO of the world's largest software company, leaving the CEO post to longtime pal and current president Steve Ballmer. Gates, still Microsoft's chairman, designated himself "chief software architect."

The company said at that time that it planned to develop a "next generation user interface" and a suite of software services to augment this even further-in-the-future version of this Windows 2000-based operating system -- an "outside the box" strategy not unlike that announced on Jan. 5th, when Apple revealed its next-generation operating system, Mac OS X, with a stunning new user interface and several "iTools" providing Internet-based storage, e-mail, home-page authoring tools and a greeting card maker. Delivering an OS that offers all things to all people is a tall order, so don't be surprised if this future OS comes comes out in a somewhat scaled-down fashion from these lofty goals. Microsoft is currently said to be studying how radical the changes to the user experience should be -- a good idea, perhaps, considering the mixed reviews Apple has received over some of the radical changes in "Aqua," its new graphical interface for Mac OS X.

Indeed, one of Microsoft's recent job postings, seen Jan. 22, 2000, reveals more details on what the company has in mind. Reports Betanews.com: "Microsoft has solicited job offers for a software design engineer who would help develop a new extensible window manager for the successor to Windows 2000. A new window manager would integrate 'skinning' right into the OS to enable a complete interface customization, similar to UNIX X11 window managers like Enlightenment."

Microsoft's Web site reads, "It will be the foundation for a new generation of Window Managers, which will allow easily extensible UI look, feel and behavior. This component will also enable the operating system to support different Window Managers, which could evolve independently from the operating system itself." It is now clear that, beginning with Windows XP ("Whistler"), these visual styles will be integral to the operating system, not just the recently released 7.0 version of Microsoft Media Player, which also supports custom skins.

64-bit Windows

Beyond Neptune, Whistler, Longhorn and/or Blackcomb lies...well, let's just say that Microsoft's future plans also include a project currently known as 64-bit Windows. This OS is intended to take advantage of the coming generation of 64-bit processors from Intel and others. There are likely to be both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows.NET Server class operating systems, but it is not clear if or when this technology will move to the consumer end of the marketplace. As of Dec. '99, Intel had just begun shipping the first test samples of the Itanium processor that will allow these 64-bit versions of Windows to run. Microsoft first previewed Win64 at WinHEC in April, 2000. We'll provide more information on these developments as details emerge.

*compatible with third-party add-ons ** "Step Up" CD

For Further Reading:

• 07/26/01 BetaNews: Windows 'Longhorn' To Succeed XP?
• 09/07/00  Whistler preview - a look at Windows.NET 1.0 New!
• PC Buyer's Guide: Troubleshooting Windows Me
• PC Buyer's Guide: Operating Systems
• PC Buyer's Guide: Internet Explorer 5.5 "Platform Preview" (Updated May 30, 2000)
• PC Buyer's Guide: Video & Audio on the Net - More info on Media Player 7 and competing players from Real, Apple, Yahoo and others.
• PC World: details on Millennium Beta 2
• About.com: Microsoft to DOS: Drop Dead
• ComputerWorld: Microsoft divulges plans for Windows 2000 upgrade
• Tech Extreme: Windows ME review
• Vulpinearts.com: Windows Me FAQ
• www.WinBeta.net: Windows Me setup tips, etc.
• ActiveWin.com: Windows Millennium Edition (Windows Me) Section
• Salon (Aug. 4, 2000): Beware of geeks bearing gifts: Microsoft may offer you a break on Windows Me, but that doesn't mean the upgrade won't cost you.
• ActiveWin.com (Aug. 27, 2000): How can I install Adobe LiveMotion 1.0 under Windows Me?
• PC Buyer's Guide (Aug. 27, 2000): More WinMe Tips

More like this . . .

How many search commands do you have in your PC?

How many search commands do you have in your PC? asked Bill Gates during his keynote introduction at Forum 2000, where he unveiled a set of next...

Linux News

2003 Aug. 7: Noted at News.com: This week, KooBox.com started selling what it calls the first complete Linux computer. US$449 gets you a 1.2 GHz...

A Mac OS X Overview

Server and Client At the 1999 Worldwide Developers Conference, Steve Jobs, Apple's interim CEO, and Avie Tevanian, Apple's senior vice president of...

Editorial: MS World Domination Scorecard

Microsoft is often accused of -- and has been convicted of -- anticompetitive behavior in the technology marketplace. In this article, I'll look at...

Windows Server 2003

Introduction Microsoft's next server platform is known as Windows Server 2003. It will be offered in both 32-bit and 64-bit editions, designed for...

Alternative GUIs for Windows XP

As we've noted in our earlier features on Alternative Graphical User Interface (GUI) options for Windows PCs, there are a number of products that can...

Codename: Whistler

Codename: Whistler This preview examines the feature-set in the Professional version of Windows XP, code-named "Whistler." There were...