I like my ME !!! Its so stable

I'm looking at 2 boxes right now that are running ME, and one laptop too.

The laptop becasue its only a 233Mhz and XP would be a pig.

The Destops are 1Ghz athlons with 512Meg of ram They at one time had XP for trial but as soon as SP2 was installed they crashed.

Windows Blamed the Bios, The manufacturer blamed windows. We installed ME again and they have run fine ever since.

They will be migrated to Linux soonwhere they will have their cycles added to the cinerella farm, but as ME boxes they ran just fine. One does all day video captures for work and the other is used for Displaying the video as well as entering information dialogs into the timestamped video. And they do all this with low resources. The hard drives are hot swappable with USB-IDE interfaces and the uptimes are measured in months. (XP has more patch reboots)

The Athlon XP1600 running windows XP needed more memory and scalled down video resolutions to do the same job. XP was a lot more bloated than ME ever was. .. Its just getting old and unsupported. But with enough memory it was fast and stable.

I still think ME was a pretty good version. Even if I retired the IBM K6-2 500 which I had used for years here. (its now in a homework centre for Kids ... Yep Still running Windows ME without issues)

Cant ever recall having a lot of issues with it. From memory it was a bit slow when I first got it, but after a memory upgrade and a couple of Microsoft patch downloads it went just fine

I think most of its issues were IE based and when either 5.5 or 6 came out it got fixed.

Anyway it worked for me until I brought the mac.

I wish I could show you our rendering farm. All Linux and so fast it makes even our hardiest Mac geeks heads swim. But I cant give any details on it. Or on what its doing right now. But we are in NZ .. so think.

For the record, I am a slacker all the way (Thats Slackware Linux for you "non-linux peoples") But I am partial to a little SUSE on my desktops too.

I use Linux or OSX (which gives me native Unix terminals when I need to SSH to another box) for all my personal on-line stuff. Sadly we sometimes need windows, and I get paid to support all the machines - Which means Fixing broken windows all day.

Ironically most spyware and virus no longer support Win 98 and ME so they give me a lot less trouble, Even the ones in the Lunchrooms which are pretty insecure, by our standards. Add to that our Firewalls, seperated networks and Very high level of security at work and we are probably not your normal PC users.

I used to work in the military, and the securiy there was nothing on this lot. I once read how Star Trek movie scripts were specially treated so that leaks could be traced, I thought it was a joke, but I tell you theres real money to be made in security.

and not without reason.

/http://home.nzcity.co.nz/news/default.asp?id=63019

Our paranoia level here just went up a few notches.

As for IE crashes .. When doesn't it .. Firefox it dude. IE is responcible for 60% of all backdoors into PC's. Its the first thing I kill on a win box.

2K is stable, but has much more issues with drivers than does ME. and its never been the most media friendly. Not ideal in a media based workplace.

Fortunately the Boss is a Mac fan all the way, Very creative and very hard on equipment so I have a real fun job and get to travel a lot in summer and work hard indoors in winter.

Very cool life for a geek .. Esp one who loves Gaming or Sci-Fi

Despite the ridiculously long boot time, I think 2k is the most stable windows release i've used (i'm a coward, i haven't tried linux yet for fear of drivers), I used to be able to tweak it to make it almost impenetrable and with a very small memory footprint.