Almost 5 years ago Windows 95 was released, constituting a huge upgrade from the previous version, Windows 3.1. There was a major interface change, and hardware plug and play was finally starting to take shape. Almost three years later Microsoft released an updated version of their popular Windows 95, with USB support and a number of other notable features (including FAT 32 support) and called it Windows 98 (with a number of minor fixes & additions - not to mention the slow demise of DOS). Following this same tradition Microsoft has released (what they say) will be the last Windows 95 based operating system, Windows Millennium Edition.

WindowsME at first glance offers almost nothing new over last year's Win98SE. The interface remains the same, 16bit code is still present (though minimized even more), and it still crashes. So what does WindowsME have over Win98SE? Not much, but it still is enough to constitute an upgrade.

Installation, I survived…

WindowsME is by far the easiest and fastest OS upgrade I have been forced to undergo by Microsoft. Simply pop in the upgrade CD, type your serial number and let windows do the rest. Installation time for my upgrade took about 35 minutes. For the most part my upgrade from Win98SE went off without incident, except for 1 BSOD (Blue Screen Of Death) that occurred because I had my mainboard's boot sector anti-virus program running. Other than that both before and after the upgrade I had no problems, and all of my current devices and programs worked fine.

Consider for a second the billions of possible hardware configurations, not to mention the numerous software programs written to run on the Windows platform. Creating an operating system to run on almost all of these operating systems is no easy task, and Microsoft seems to have done a decent job, though not a perfect one. An example of this imperfection was apparent, as in my upgrade installation there was a BSOD (as I stated earlier).

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