Exploration into Microsoft’s Windows Millennium — THG.RU

Introduction

On September 14th Microsoft officially released Windows Millennium Edition (Win Me), Microsoft’s latest consumer OS, to the public. Most of our reviews have focused on consumer level hardware so when this new OS was released, I decided that I’d move my testing over to the new OS after a bit of validation on my part. My main concern was the general loss of performance due to the bloated nature of Microsoft’s newer OSes trying to create a «friendlier» user interface. I also didn’t plan to waste time on a generally unstable OS for future testing either. We’ll take a look at what new features this OS has to offer, run through some benchmarks and give you some general feedback on this OS.

What’s New?

In a nutshell, Win Me is Win98 with the addition of updated digital media support, a System Restore feature, somewhat update driver support and possibly boots faster. Of that list, only two features are of any real big interest to many of us at best.

The new digital media support is basically achieved through the standard addition of Media Player 7 and Microsoft Movie Maker. Media Player 7 is already available through download so it’s nothing unique to Win Me. It offers digital playback of today’s most popular formats as well as CD burning and ripping capabilities.

MS Movie Maker is basically what it sounds like, a movie editing tool. With this tool you can create or edit home movies with or without sound. I was able to create videos with my webcam very quickly but ran into somewhat of a wall. Unfortunately there was only one format to save as, Windows Media Video Format (*.WMV). As you can imagine I was a bit annoyed but it’s further evidence that Microsoft wants to be in control of more than just our OS. Still pictures can be taken or saved as JPEG only. This is obviously nothing ground breaking but it’s available for free.

What’s New? Continued

The Microsoft System Restore allows you (and windows for that matter) to backup your system at certain points in time by creating «store points.» This can be handy in the case of a troublesome installation that causes instabilities. Clearly this is Microsoft’s attempt at safeguarding the not so rare crashes we’ve come to know and love. System Restore gives you the ability to restore your machine to its previous status without too much of a hassle. I did a few minor tests with this and it seemed to work without any hitches. However, there may be a huge drawback to enabling it.

After prolonged use of System Restore, my hard disk space started to mysteriously disappear. What was the source of this problem? It was the _RESTORE directory that the System Restore program uses to store information. On an early test disk, I had installed and removed a few programs for testing purposes. When I checked the total size of my restore directory after all this, it had bloated to nearly 150 MBs of backup data! Keep in mind that this disk was clean a few hours earlier. This might not directly affect 3D performance but it will seriously hinder disk performance with tons of useless data being constantly backed up on a daily basis.

Another major note was the inability to have this feature enabled while running Sysmark 2000. I had left it on initially and my _Restore directory bloated to over a GIG of data! Sysmark 2000 runs were all completed with this featured disabled for obvious reasons.

Some of the other minor benefits that I noticed were the expanded driver support for system devices that was built into the OS and a slightly faster boot time. I didn’t require as many drivers to get my test platform going as I did with Win98SE. My boot time on a normal test disk improved by only a few seconds but faster nonetheless.

One last thing to mention is that some of you may miss is the availability of «DOS» in Win Me. Although you can still get into a DOS command window through tricky methods (like Start->Run-> «command»), DOS is no longer available on any of the startup or shut down option lists.

The Install

Installing Win Me was a breeze for the most part aside from a few minor hiccups. The upgrade of our normal test disk took about 20 minutes. After entering the CD key, the system installed on its own for the most part. On one of the last reboots, I did hang once but a soft reboot fixed whatever happened and the install was able to complete on its own. Obviously my test platform is relatively new so others might have varying results.

Performance Expectations

From the changes I can see so far, I don’t expect much of a change to my 3D performance results as the video drivers are basically the same and the OS shouldn’t be much different aside from the newer features. The DirectX revision on the Win Me CD is newer that what you can download currently so that may provide some interesting results.

The one thing I would expect to be slower is disk performance, as the System Restore seems to be a resource hog while enabled. I found that even after disabling this feature, it mysteriously toggled itself back on at times. I find this to be very disturbing. Let’s hope Microsoft can offer a patch to keep this under control.

3D tests were run across various graphics cards and at the low-resolution setting of 640x480x16 to best detect performance variances between the OSes.

Sysmark 2000 was only run on a GeForce2 GTS and at the 1024x768x16 resolution. This benchmark will give a good reflection of overall system and hard disk performance.

Test Setup

Quake 3 Arena Demo001

In most cases the scores are about even with Win98SE having the best average across our graphics card lineup.

Evolva Rolling Demo

Things are a bit clearer when it comes to the Evolva results. Win Me is clearly the slower OS but only by a small margin. Most people won’t notice a difference but one would expect a performance increase with their new OS, not decrease

Sysmark 2000

Surprise! Win98SE once again takes the top spot as Win Me struggles to keep up the pace. Win Me does claim one victory ironically enough in Netscape Communicator. I wasn’t surprised to see these results as Win Me does feel a bit sluggish during general use at times.

Sysmark 2000 testing ran smoothly on our Win98SE disk but I couldn’t say the same for the Win Me setup. It took several runs on the Win Me setup before I was able to come up with the test scores.

Performance Conclusion

Overall I must say that I’m dissatisfied with the performance of Win Me because of the questionable claims by Microsoft to have improved this OS. In 3D testing, the OS is nearly on par with Win98SE even though Microsoft claims to have improved overall performance of this OS. In hard disk intensive testing like Sysmark 2000, things only got worse as scores were clearly lower in Win Me. Switching to Win Me will, without a doubt, cost you some performance in everyday use.

Conclusion

Aside from the various benchmark scores generated I did spend a fair amount of time with Win Me on several machines, including one at home. For the most part the OS was stable on my everyday applications. System Restore is annoying and it does noticeably slow overall system performance down when enabled. Toggle it off and things might actually be ok but unfortunately it turns itself on after a crash and randomly at times so you’ll have to live with it until a fix is created.

Win Me might be a useful OS for new PCs as it’s basically a slightly slower version of Win98SE with all the latest Microsoft programs and updates. The performance losses should be transparent to your average users but not likely for the tech groups. Users of Win98SE should have no real reason to upgrade to this OS in my opinion, at least not yet. If your current machine is running stable in Win98SE, I wouldn’t bother taking a chance for the time being until a service pack for Win Me makes its way onto the net.

Microsoft has yet again released an OS that raises many questions. Why do we really need this upgrade? Why is it slower? How come Microsoft is trying to incorporate more free software packages into their «OS» that have nothing to do with an OS? Netscape and the browser war come to mind. If Microsoft would indeed improve the actual OS itself instead of adding so many useless features, we might have a real reason to run out and buy Win Me.