Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition - Software Review - Evaluation

Home Office Computing, Oct, 2000 by Eric Grevstad

* Requirements: 150MHz processor, 32MB RAM and 300MB hard disk space (64MB

and 1GB recommended), CD-ROM drive, sound card, modem, mouse * Est. Street Price: $90 upgrade ($60 for Win 98 users to Jan. 15) * Manufacturer: Microsoft Corp., 800-426-9400, www.microsoft.com

HOC RATING 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

MICROSOFT'S WINDOWS LOGO MAY BE colorful, but its operating system guidelines are black and white: If you use a PC for business, you're supposed to use Windows 2000 Professional. Windows 95 and 98 are for consumers and families who use computers for entertainment, Web surfing, and games--and so is Win 98's new successor, Windows Millennium Edition.

In the real world, it's not that simple. Win 2000 is much more robust and reliable than its Win 9x relatives--including the newcomer known as Windows Me. But it demands newer, faster hardware for adequate performance, and its industrial-strength networking and security features are overkill for a two- or three-PC household. That's why Windows 2000-powered home offices are still rare--and why Windows Me, which scatters some real performance and stability improvements amid lots of home-movie and pop-music gewgaws, is big news.

Freebies and Frills Like Win 98, Windows Me carries a list price of $109 for upgraders or $209 for a full version, but Microsoft is cutting the Win 98 (not 95) upgrade's street price to $60 through mid-January. If even that's too much, you can sample a few features as free downloads.

These include Internet Explorer 5.5--a minor upgrade to Microsoft's browser that adds a print preview--and several antitrust-busting links to the MSN Internet service, ranging from MSN Messenger (a would-be rival to AOL Instant Messenger) to online games like checkers and hearts from the MSN Gaming Zone.

Another freebie is Windows Media Player 7, which strives to replace RealJukebox, WinAmp, and other utilities by cataloging and playing MP3, MPG, and other audio and video files as well as audio CDs and Internet radio stations. Media Player 7 offers a variety of interface "skins" and lava-lamp animations for teens, but takes forever to load and play a simple WAV sound, and can't save CD tracks as MP3 files--it uses Microsoft's Windows Media Audio (WMA) format, which yields smaller files but is less popular than MP3.

Other multimedia enhancements, not available for Win 95/98, include Windows Movie Maker, a simple video editor akin to the Apple iMac's iMovie. Compatible with cheaper analog camcorders using RCA-to-USB adapters as well as digital models with FireWire cables (iMovie supports only the latter), Movie Maker imports and compresses footage, helpfully marking scene changes within a movie. It then lets you drag scenes, stills, simple transitions, and audio files or voice-overs to an editing timeline.

Unfortunately, you can't add titles, and can save videos--anybody spot a trend here?--only in Microsoft's Media Player-friendly Advanced Streaming Format, not as MPG, AVI, or QuickTime clips. That makes Movie Maker most useful for posting short clips on your Web site, leaving iMovie the e-mail-Junior's-birthday-party-to-Grandma audience.

Yet another acronym is WIA, for Windows Image Acquisition--a programming interface Microsoft hopes will soon be standard for USB-interfaced digital cameras and scanners. When you connect a WIA-compliant camera, Windows Me recognizes it as if it were a disk drive in My Computer, letting you preview or delete images in the camera without first downloading them to your PC, or import an image directly into a document (rather as the TWAIN standard lets you do with scanner images). It's handy, though not as full-featured as the software supplied with most digital cameras.

My Pictures and other Windows Explorer folders have gained the nifty ability to show images as thumbnail icons and rotate through them in a slide show, as well as a zoom-in or -out preview. You can also rotate an image, though there's no undo function.

Splicing Windows 2000's DNA The best parts of Millennium are under the hood. DOS diehards will mourn the loss of "real mode"--including the option to restart or boot to a DOS prompt and the ability to create boot disks aside from the emergency floppy made during installation--but most DOS programs still run fine in windowed or full-screen sessions. The DOS-ectomy makes Windows Me boot faster--about one-third faster (1 minute 10 seconds versus 1 minute 40) on our Dell Dimension desktop. Pretty impressive, considering the install took nearly half a gigabyte of hard disk space.

Win 98 Second Edition added Internet connection sharing to the operating system's peer-to-peer network support, and Windows Me takes both a step further with a Home Networking Wizard that walks you through printer, file, and Internet sharing without spelunking through Control Panel submenus. Between that and the fact that some of today's alternatives to Ethernet--including phone-line and wireless home network kits--don't work with Win 2000, Millennium is the best home networking platform yet.