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don`t think you are exempt in any way shape or form.if they want to mess you up they will.I made my point before.its up to you.??
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Any virus written to exploit 98 will affect ME. Take it as a given and you wont be hurt.
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don`t think you are exempt in any way shape or form.if they want to mess you up they will.I made my point before.its up to you.??
Mech1,
Thank you for your advice.
I appreciate the dangers of viruses and I do take precautions which is why I examine the technical notices from Microsoft and other agencies.
I was simply asking if anyone knew if the statement that ME was less susceptible(not immune) to viruses was based on fact.
C
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It is possible to write a specific virus for 98 and not ME and vice versa.
The majority of the holes exploited in 98 are scripts or TCPIP stack.
AS this has to be standard for comms and applications to work across 98 and ME then both are equally at risk.
This is why most viruses infect 98/ME/2000 & XP.
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... However the notices ona couple of recent viruses gave detail of the OS affected and did not include ME.
Maybe an oversight? As others have said, it was only ever a stop-gap version. It was basically Windows 98 with a few updates and DOS hidden more carefully. There was only a short period between its launch and that of Windows XP.
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Maybe an oversight? As others have said, it was only ever a stop-gap version. It was basically Windows 98 with a few updates and DOS hidden more carefully. There was only a short period between its launch and that of Windows XP.
From what you and RF have said it seems that ME is probably just as susceptible.
Just a point - Windows 2000 was produced for a good while after Windows ME ceased and before XP was launched
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Hi Cardew
Re your just a point - Microsoft's "problem" is that large corporates have commited to a particular OS and the time and effort involved in migrating to a later version is considerable, so M$ have to continue to support earlier operating systems in order to keep them happy.
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Windows 2000 replaced Windows NT4, and actually pre-dated ME.
Until XP came along there were two completely separate versions of Windows:- Windows 3.11 - 95 - 98 - ME - a pretty front end for MSDOS and more likely to be used by home users.
- Windows NT 3.51, NT 4.0, 2000 - not based on DOS and more likely to be used by corporate users.
All these were replaced by Windows XP but this was really an update of the NT/2000 line.
ME was the end of the line: it wasn't updated. To replicate the old split between the earlier versions, a Home and Professional version of XP were introduced. However, these aren't two different OSes. Home is just Professional with some features stripped out.
There's a website showing a Windows timeline in nauseating detail at www.levenez.com/windows . It's certainly helping me with my insomnia...
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Welliesorter,
Thanks for the information. I certainly hadn't appreciated that Win 2000 pre-dated Win ME.
For some reason many of the main manufactures of home use PCs stopped using ME and started loading 2000 quite a while before XP was launched.
May I ask a further question. Daughter has just acquired a laptop from work with XP Professional pre-loaded. She has the unused discs for this OS and the Certificate of Authenticity. As she uses the family desktop quite a bit I was considering upgrading it from ME to XP using those discs.
Are there any problems in carrying out this upgrading? The PC is a Pentium 3 - 800 with 128mb RAM
C
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Cardew.as far as I`m aware its a reload disc your talking about ugrading yours with.I doubt it will work as the disc will only have drivers and software for the laptop.plus it will when inserted check your pc and if no components found that it recognises.will refuse to load.I could be wrong but have tried it myself and it refused
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Windows ME is generally considered to have been a disaster, both from the point of view of its reliability and its sales. My own experience with Win ME was absolutely ghastly and is the main reason I no longer use any Microsoft products unless I have no choice, usually on other people's computers. Having said that, Windows XP does seem much more reliable from what I've heard. Your computer should be able to handle XP quite well for things like Internet, email, and wordprocessing, though it will struggle with games. It would definitely be worth getting another 128mb of RAM. However you will not be able to install XP from the laptop disks as (apart from that being illegal) they will be set up to load only on that exact machine. Even if you could, you have to register XP with MS so they'd know. If you're fed up and want a windows-like alternative, try Xandros Linux www.xandros.com. For $90 it will even run MS Office and several other Windows programs. Xandros takes about an hour to install and will partition the harddisk for you so you can keep Windows on there. You could download Mandrake Linux www.mandrakelinux.com for free.
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Chris,
You seem to be in the vast majority in slating ME, but I had it for about two years and regret getting rid of that particular PC.
I never had any bother with the OS at all and found it miles better than XP. Perhaps I was just lucky, but I would be interested to hear why others regarded ME as a poor system.
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Perhaps I was just lucky, but I would be interested to hear why others regarded ME as a poor system.
As with all OSs performance will vary depending on the hardware you have. For me, running it on a laptop, ME was a complete nightmare. It hung roughly every hour and caused data loss when it did. The only way to avoid it was to preempt the hang with a reboot. Given this was a machine that worked for its living a reboot every 50 minutes or so was not acceptable. As I say ME may have been more stable on different hardware.
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..I would be interested to hear why others regarded ME as a poor system.
At one point I was getting one callout a week to remove ME from people's PCs and stick 98SE back on. The main problem (for me, at least) was that it had the mother of all memory leaks and would frequently thrash the harddrive as the swapfile usage became silly. It suffered from a few massive instability problems with fairly common devices as well, not to mention extremely poor performance for many gamers. There were quite a few cases of it corrupting vast areas of the harddrive, but I never managed to identify why this happened.
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I can think of two potential areas of problem.
1) If the disks are stamped with the computer manufacturers name, it will almost definitely only load on the brand of system. (e.g. Dell XP disks look for a Dell bios otherwise they won't load).
2) And of course the license key. I guess that's what the Cert of Auth is? Companies may use cloning software to produce many identical systems for corporate use, and depending on their licence agreement with M$ they may use the Corporate Edition, which effectively allows multiple use of the same license. This may mean that your license would be valid. However, if the license (code) has been used in installation of the machine, and you re-use it on another machine, once you connect to the internet it will find that it has already been installed on another system (witha different hardware configuration) and you will not be able to register the operating system (and I believe it will eventually stop running, in some form).
If you are at all handy with PCs, buy yourself a new BIG hard disk (80gb are around £50 now!), put it in your computer as C drive, move your old disk to D drive and do a clean install of XP onto it. Ensure you get all the M$ updates and critical patches BEFORE you do anything else (if you have time, before being hit by Sasser or it's friends!). It will ask to to register with M$ - try it and see what happens. If it works, you can easily reinstall all your other software onto it then move your docs etc from the D drive - later using that as a place to backup you important stuff. I believe strongly that a new OS is an opportunity to have a fresh start!
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Xp has to be activated by M$ either by phone or through the internet.and just by installing you are bound by licencing terms and conditions which I think means a licencing fee would need to be paid in order to get it activated.bearing in mind changing hard drive wont make any difference to whether the os will install.Due to checking operation of XP before install.correct me if wrong?
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IIRC I installed XP Pro (legit version) on a new drive. During install I had to enter the code which was with the CD. So without that you won't get it installed.
However, registration is slightly different and, again IIRC, I could use the OS for a limited time without registering it (although I may be thinking of XP Office here).
However again, if the laptop was installed from a corporate image, chances are that they will have used their corporate license rather than that with the CD (if it is there) so (if it is there) it should be a valid and unregistered code.
M$ checks for and disallows duplicate registrations using the same code.
And I suppose in theory, although the code may not have been registered, the software/code could be considered unauthorised.
I didn't mean to suggest that adding a hard drive would make the install work any differently. The idea of that was to 1) make sure that it installs OK, and can be registered, without destroying data or OS on existing hard drive and 2) provide a "clean install". Keeping the old disk in the system as D drive means that once you are ready you can transfer all documents etc easily.
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Thanks for all your advice. I would experiment with linux if it were not for the fact that SWMO and daughter use the PC. Despite both having a Masters degree, if there is the slightest change in what appears on screen when they switch on, they are up in arms. They still haven't forgiven me for changing from Win 3.1!!
I kicked of this subject because I had been told that ME was less susceptible to viruses than 98/2000/XP; seemingly this is not so. I contemplated upgrading to XP Pro simply because it is a newer system.
It has been assumed that I am unhappy with ME which is not really so and I don't think my posts have implied this. I bought 3 Gateway PC's in August 2000 - all with ME. They were available on an amazing(legal) deal. My son has one, another is at my home, and the third where I lived during week. The one that gets the most use sometimes 'hangs' particularly during shut-down. M$ recognise it is a problem with ME but their fix hasn't totally solved it. I get round it by disconnecting BT Broadband before shutting down.
The other 2 machines have never had a problem other than occasionally hanging; one is on BT Broadband and the other dial up.
In my place in Florida(where I am off tomorrow) I have a new PC(2.6ghz, 256mb RAM) with XP Home as the OS and that occasionally hangs. I have never used a PC that didn't.
C
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