You can go xp or win2k. You can return cs if it’s within 30 days.
Win ME is junk. You’ll be amazed at the improvement that Win2K or WinXP will give you if you have a good computer. However…DO NOT UPGRADE the operating system. You’ve got to do a clean install.
What exactly are your system specs?
Bob
D_Vanem wrote:
I’d rather not update my system to
Win XP just to use PS.
Keep in mind that Win2K and XP are both immeasurably better than ME, and you would likely see a positive improvement in your system if you did upgrade. Upgrading is not without some risk, of course (needing to locate newer drivers for hardware, etc.) but I think this particular upgrade would be well-worth it.
WinME just wasn’t a very good release of Windows – I’d personally prefer to work in Win98SE than ME any day.
Brian
Your options are:
Upgrade Windows
Find PS6 or 7
Buy a Mac.
WinME just wasn’t a very good release of Windows – I’d personally prefer to work in Win98SE than ME any day.
Brian
Can you elaborate why ME wasn’t a very good release? I have three computers at home and babysit two others. One has XP Pro, one XP Home and the others ME. The only "negative" I’ve heard regards the slowdown caused by System Restore running in the background. System Restore can be turned off to solve that problem but it’s saved my ass too many times to recommmend that —- and it’s also an XP feature.
ME can also run applications that XP can’t. Two that come to mind are PhotoShop Deluxe Business Edition (needed for the included PDF writer) and Ulead’s iPhoto Plus. I know there are others but none pop immediately to mind.
Also ME is nothing but an incremental upgrade to 98SE.
Please elaborate your statement with facts. If you’re correct, I’ll rush to convert my wife’s computer currently running ME. She won’t overjoyed 🙂
I DO think XP is the better product by far. But ME is not as bad as people claim, but seldom backup their claim.
The best deal for XP Pro is $140 from www.newegg.com . Under Microsoft’s policy you need to buy it with a computer component (not accessory) and newegg have several < $3 items that qualify.
It’s a DOS based system and it’s junk. If you want more than that, just do a google search.
XP is far more stable and secure.
Bob
It’s a DOS based system and it’s junk. If you want more than that, just do a google search.
XP is far more stable and secure.
Bob
My, my! In other words you have no specifics? To make a claim like you did, one would expect that you’d at least have a few specifics to share short of it’s DOS based (so what) and it’s junk (boy, that’s specific — NOT). Short of any specifics I have to assume you’re blowing smoke.
PS- I didn’t say XP wasn’t more stable —- but secure? How?
I love XP but you’re statement claimed 98SE was a better product. No WAY by virtue of System Restore alone.
That was someone else’s statement. You want to use ME, go ahead. I couldn’t possibly care less.
Bob
D_Vanem
It sounds like you haven’t bought PS yet – why not buy Photoshop Elements? It will run on ME and it will do everything you will probably ever need (esp. if you don’t want to go to a professional OS) and it will save you enough money to buy me a 40 gig iPod for Christmas.
Don,
Also ME is nothing but an incremental upgrade to 98SE.
No, Think of ME as a very early XP beta that never should have been released to the public! XP is what ME was supposed to be.
But ME is not as bad as people claim, but seldom backup their claim. Yes it is. Believe me I have seen and repaired enough ME computers to know!
There is no comparison to be made between (XP\2K) and ME or any other 9x release for that matter.
As for 98SE vs. ME in the tests we have run ME is far less stable. You are twice as likely to see a blue screen in ME. It runs most applications about 20% slower. MS tried to hide the fact that it was still DOS based while at the same time making it more difficult to repair simple problems. ME was a rushed release (Before the antitrust ruling) and it shows.
Quite frankly I don’t know how anyone who has run 98SE and ME on the same system could even consider running ME.
Put simply ME is a joke!
I’m just an old curmudgeon, the only reason, way back when, that I moved from DOS to Windows was that I couldn’t get good print drivers for DOS compared to Windows for my word processor.(heck of a reason wasn’t it?).
Since then I have used Win 3.0, 3.10, 95, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP Home and XP Pro. THe current XP OS is well worth the upgrade. All sorts of problems just magically disappear. Unless you are running dual CPUs or a massive Network, you don’t need the Professional version. At about $100, the XP home upgrade will get the job done and is well worth it.
No, Think of ME as a very early XP beta that never should have been released to the public! XP is what ME was supposed to be.
No way was ME intended to be an XP Beta. ME and XP have very little in common. ME is clearly a Win98SE upgrade. The only significant difference is between ME and 98 is System Restore.
Yes it is. Believe me I have seen and repaired enough ME computers to know!
Me too… I’ve repaired more than enough systems to know it’s a trivial 98SE upgrade no more prone to failure.
There is no comparison to be made between (XP\2K) and ME or any other 9x release for that matter.
I agreed to that several posts ago 🙂
As for 98SE vs. ME in the tests we have run ME is far less stable. You are twice as likely to see a blue screen in ME.
Not my experience.
It runs most applications about 20% slower.
Agree it’s slower (not anywhere near 20%) but primarily due to System Restore running in the background. Turn System Restore off if that causes you problems.
MS tried to hide the fact that it was still DOS based while at the same time making it more difficult to repair simple problems. ME was a rushed release (Before the antitrust ruling) and it shows.
Whether MS tried to hide the fact that it’s still DOS-based is irrelevant. It’s no more difficult to repair than 98. And if you’re running System Restore it’s often actually easier.
Quite frankly I don’t know how anyone who has run 98SE and ME on the same system could even consider running ME.
Well, we’ll just have to disagree on that one. You’ve presented no objective data to backup your claims. Your experience is no more than mine. System Restore is enough to make me favor ME over 98SE any day.
Put simply ME is a joke!
Maybe to someone who can’t objectively supply specifics. That kind of statement ranks right up there with "[insert product name here] sucks! is trash! etc.
But it still needs to be installed clean. An upgrade installation is a disaster waiting to happen.
Bob
Don_Coon wrote:
Can you elaborate why ME wasn’t a very good release?
Briefly: ME is an extention of the 9x product line, which is generally inferior to the NT/2K/XP product line in a number of key areas, most notably stability & memory management. Additionally, most users have reported that ME is nowhere near as reliable as 98SE was in those areas and more, and the general consensus was that ME ended up being more of a downgrade from 98 than an upgrade.
In terms of applications that run on ME but not on 2K/XP, they are very few and mostly forgettable to be honest. Conversely, there are quite a few professional-level applications that require NT/2K/XP and will not run on ME at all (as you have noticed).
You seem very devoted to ME and that’s fine, but your options will become more and more limited as time goes on. At some point you will be forced to upgrade, very likely because of the need to run some software that won’t run on ME… wait, that’s what you’re running into now. Despite a few annoyances (activation, the slight pauses that occur all-too-frequently) Photoshop CS is a great new release and is worth the added expenditure of upgrading to a superior OS in the process.
Brian
Don,
If you believe everything your typed you and Millennium Edition deserve each other.
No way was ME intended to be an XP Beta.
ME should never have been released. At the time it was supposed to merge the NT and 9x product lines as XP did. It wasn’t ready for that large a step so they patched their mess as best they could and shipped it to market.
Turn System Restore off if that causes you problems.
The decreased speed is not due to system restore. System restore only runs during idle time. The question may be what is running to check for idle time and if it causes any problems. Chances are it is something that runs in the background anyway. At any rate even with system restore off the OS is less stable and slower.
Whether MS tried to hide the fact that it’s still DOS-based is irrelevant. It’s no more difficult to repair than 98. And if you’re running System Restore it’s often actually easier.
It isn’t if you have a boot disk handy. For instance you are at a friends house and they can’t boot into Windows ME, they have no boot disk. With 98 you can boot to command prompt only and fix the problem. With ME you have to hope that F8 and a boot option are enough to correct the problem.
ME can also run applications that XP can’t.
Even under compatibility mode? I think you did something wrong.
I don’t know why I am even wasting my time with this discussion. Bottom line… NT kernel is better than 9x so run XP. If you have a system that can handle it run XP.
You have 5 computers to look after. I manage a network in a 10 acre facility with 120 computers. I could pull 5 identical computers off the shelf and stress test them with clean installs of 98 and ME, but I don’t have to because I already have! 🙂
You seem very devoted to ME and that’s fine, but your options will become more and more limited as time goes on. At some point you will be forced to upgrade, very likely because of the need to run some software that won’t run on ME… wait, that’s what you’re running into now. Despite a few annoyances (activation, the slight pauses that occur all-too-frequently) Photoshop CS is a great new release and is worth the added expenditure of upgrading to a superior OS in the process.
Brian
Whoa!
Didn’t I state a few times that I’m running XP Pro on my prime computer? And that I have another (my laptop) running XP Home???
That’s some devotion to ME, isn’t it. Just don’t let facts get in the way of your anti-ME crusade 🙂
If you on the other hand have fully converted to XP, you were probably forced to trash a few applications and/or some hardware not supported by XP.
There’s method to my madness 🙂 And if I really thought 98SE was better than ME, I still have the Win98 CD and thus could switch. Hell, I could switch to Win95 if I was foolish enough.
So, at the risk of repeating myself, let me make this VERY CLEAR: Yes, I think Win XP (Pro or Home) is far superior to Win ME and Win 98SE. But my experience in no way supports the the claim that ME is "junk", "trash", "sucks" or whatever. My personal experience on dozens of computers I support doesn’t validate the claim that ME crashes more than 98ME. Sooo…. to me, ME is an incremental upgrade of Win98SE providing System Restore which is an ass saver even if it does slow performance by 5%. So what; CPU speed is cheap.
End of debate. You’re entitled to your opinion and YMMV.
I liked Me. It ran fine. 98se ran fine. 98 was a dog. 95 was so so. Win2k is a dog (on my network at work, otherwise it’s fine). XP Pro is rock solid and fast.
There used to be a link from microsoft’s site: mean time to crash for ME was about 6 weeks. For Windows 2000 or Windows XP it was over a year. My experience with dozens of computers echos what others have suggested: Windows ME was a step backward in stability over Windows 98 second edition. Windows 2000 worked well but had lack of driver problems and didn’t have the features for browsing images and music built in. I use Windows XP Pro. I’ve had one crash in about a year.
There used to be a link from microsoft’s site: mean time to crash for ME was about 6 weeks
that was about par for the whole 9x/me series. then you needed to reinstall about every 6 months. you can’t compare nt/2k/xp and 9x/me. apples and oranges – which i think is what don c is saying. he likes xp better, but Me wasn’t so bad. I agree with that.
…. edit: and I for one pushed my systems pretty dern hard with sw development/games/still editing and video.
Whew!
Thanks all! I seem to spawned a thread on the virtues/lack thereof of Win ME!
Personally, I find ME to be okay. I haven’t had many problems with it. I just want to run Photoshop, but now the current version won’t install on ME, forcing me to choose: going with an earlier version of PS, upgrading my OS, (or as someone pointed out, getting a Mac!)
I think my cheapest / easiest option is get an earlier version on e-Bay.
Some of you have mentioned that merely upgrading to XP, rather than a full clean install, will cause problems. Could you elaborate please? Will upgrading force me to reinstall all my other software? Is an ME upgraded to XP not the same thing as a full install? I have no idea how these things work, but I would assume the update disk looks at my machine and adds/deletes whatever files are needed to yield XP. I can imagine that some junk might get left behind in the process, some registry items might still linger, but is this a serious problem? If any of you have details, or personal experience, please post here.
Thank you all for responding. I have found this forum recently, and it seems to be full of very knowledgeable, friendly people.
Dvan, if I were going to upgrade anyway (upgradse to photoshop or PS & XP) I’d go for XP and PSCS. You won’t be sorry.
If you’re bent on getting an older verison, adobe has a form that must be filled out to transfer a license (i’m sure someone here will provide a link). BUT you never know when buying on ebay. Many say never opened, no manuals, oem and are actually pirate copies. you will not be able to upgrade these.
I think your best bet is to get xp and cs.
Some of you have mentioned that merely upgrading to XP, rather than a full clean install, will cause problems. Could you elaborate please?
Alot of junk gets left behind and can wind up causing the O/S to be very unstable. This includes drivers from the earlier system which can wind up conflicting with the new ones.
Will upgrading force me to reinstall all my other software?
Yes. In fact, Adobe recommends a clean install, but for those who decide against that advice they still recommmend uninstalling all applications and then reinstalling after the O/S upgrade.
Is an ME upgraded to XP not the same thing as a full install?
You can purchase the XP upgrade. You’ll be asked during the installation to insert your ME disk for verification purposes.
I have no idea how these things work, but I would assume the update disk looks at my machine and adds/deletes whatever files are needed to yield XP. I can imagine that some junk might get left behind in the process, some registry items might still linger, but is this a serious problem?
Yes, it is.
If any of you have details, or personal experience, please post here.
I’ve done more clean installs than I can count for friends and myself. I can tell you that from start to fininsh including drivers, fonts, applications it shouldn’t take more than 5-6 hours.
Just browse the forums here and elsewhere on the internet. The time you save doing an upgrade is more than wasted later while troubleshooting an unstable operating system. The upgradable operating system came from the Marketing Department, not the engineers.
Thank you all for responding. I have found this forum recently, and it seems to be full of very knowledgeable, friendly people.
We try. <g>
Bob
But ME is not as bad as people claim, but seldom backup their claim.
Trust me, ME is really that bad ha!
Unless you are running dual CPUs or a massive Network, you don’t need the
Professional version.
I agree that most home users don’t need the pro at home, but there is a lot more to the Pro version than just dual CPU’s or large networks. Don’t talk about things you don’t understand
Didn’t ME have issues installing on systems with >1 gig of RAM?
And I remember from the brief time that I used that awful OS that even if you turned System Restore off, it would eventually, somehow, turn itself back on.
ME was intended to be a feature merge before XP, its precursor if you will, but not in the way of OS stability or anything like that – nope, it was meant to be a precursor for all those useless iTools-alike apps that MS put in XP. Home Movie Maker, a new Windows Media Player, the much maligned System Restore and other apps all made their debut in ME. However, as it was all running under 98’s rather arcane semi-32bit kernel, things oft came crashing down.
By the time XP came around, and they had the stability of the by-then matured 2000 kernel, the update for all those apps / tools went relatively well and so XP is a pretty good upgrade for those who want it.
But comparing 98SE to ME? Nope, 98SE wins out, purely because it didn’t have half the crap that MS shovelled into ME and thus was much more stable. Sure, if all you are going to use is Wordpad and maybe Calculator then ME does just fine. Any more than that, and things got nasty…
Of course, your mileage may – and indeed does – vary, but the general concensus is that ME was a child that should have been abandoned at birth – if not before. (-:
According to the Microsoft "Windows Desktop Product Life Cycle Support and Availability Policies for Consumers" web site:
Windows ME enters its "Extended Support phase" on 12/31/2003 followed by "Non-Supported phase" on 12/31/2004.
Windows 98/98SE entered its "Extended Support phase" on 6/30/2002 and its "Non-Supported phase" on 6/30/2003.
Microsoft URL:
<
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/desktop/consumer/ default.mspx>
It will be soon be all history!
Didn’t ME have issues installing on systems with >1 gig of RAM?
ME and 98 were only designed to handle 1GB RAM period (by MS’s own admission).
And anything over 512, you need a statement in system.ini to keep the page file from wasting the rest of it.
Mac
