Does 5.4 run OK with Win ME?

[Rich LePage]

We run most of our MTU systems still with Win 98SE, but
recently I picked up a WinME upgrade version for like $10,
and wondered if anyone here has any notes, problems,
quirks etc they've run into using WinME -- and whether
in your experience it's more stable than Win98SE


Also whether it will "natively" be OK with big drives.
For Win 98SE and large drives, DEFRAG and SCANDISK
etc have to be patched to work correctly. How about with
ME?

We only currently run Win XP Pro on 1 MTU system,
everything else is Win 98 and even a couple old
RevJ boards still running on Win95 (I should really
upgrade those!)

Any notes, thoughts etc will be appreciated--especially
if you've found ME to be more stable than Win98SE.

Thx-- Rich

[MTUSUPPORT]

Rich,
Under ME it will run. The settings will need to be set identical to your 98SE systems.

I would say 98SE was more stable than ME. I personally Like XP PRO the most.

As to about Big drives under ME I am not sure. This may also depend on the bios of the motherboard, whether it will support it or not.

[geezer]

Although I have no experience with ME and MTU, I can tell you that every experience I have had with it otherwise, and all the anecdotal tales from others, are a pretty big drag.

It tends to be very quirky, problematic and unstable. I have read that Microsoft basically abandoned it before really fixing major bugs.

All of my normal problem-solving techniques never worked with ME. It was very much an interim step between the DOS kernel days of 98 and the new world of XP, as far as I can tell, and without the advantages or stability of either..

I am certainly no expert, but there is my 2 cents.

[Rich LePage]

Thanks Bryan, I'll give it a try then with the ME. At $10 for the upgrade, I couldn't pass the thing up.

The big drives thing with Win 98 is not so much a BIOS issue,
even with a BIOS that has no problems seeing a large drive
correctly and ID'ing it, Win 98SE will fail to work right with
drives over 60 gigs usually, formatted FAT32.

Scandisk, defrag and also just copying files to or from the drive
can result in the whole thing hanging, but the fix is a M/soft patch
for Win98SE and then things seem to work fine.

I first ran into it with a Maxtor 80 gig drive, and Maxtor alerted me to it when I first had set up the drive using their utility.
I usually still set them up with FDISK, but didn't that time.
Turned out Maxtor had a new version (out now) but in replying to me they brought up the issue and pointed me to the MS patch for it.

I have the patch on all the machines now, since I am often swapping drives between systems. We have a bunch of drives from 20 to 80 gigs so can keep all a project's data on a drive for some time while client reviews it and then comes back for changes etc.

Hope all's well there with all of you, say hi to everyone for me.

Rich

[Rich LePage]

Thank you too Geezer. Makes me think twice about it.
I do have a spare machine just now so might try taking the
plunge just to bang on it some, but thanks for the advice
about normal troubleshooting not working same, def. a
consideration.

Will let you all know once I try it if I can make it crash or do
weird/crazy things. Not too busy this week so might get to it,
but of course biz changes every day, so can't say for sure!