Installing Windows Millenium page

Windows Millenium
Welcome to the ME page. Windows ME was the final MS-DOS based Windows operating system from Microsoft.
There were a few improvements over Win98, with the addition of Movie Maker and System Restore.
Some of the minor improvements were vastly greater than MEs' predecessor, with the ability to view picture thumbnails in Windows Explorer,the improved scandisk, and the updates to Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player established Me as 'the next great thing' .
Unfortunately they continued to include many annoying attributes with ME, mostly associated with installing new hardware. After a short time Me was regarded as too bloated and unstable to replace Win98 for most people.

Here are screenshots of installing Windows XP -

We are using an old computer system to install Windows Millenium. So it will go 'a little' slow.
Since this computer does not support booting from a CD we start the computer with the CD drivers loaded, and we type X:\setup.exe to begin..
Our first 'task' is Scandisk checking our hard disks for errors..

In this install we are using a repair disk from an Emachine, so the 'unknown user' is an automatic feature which we could not avoid.

Windows Millenium was released on September 14, 2000 with support until July 11, 2006..

Windows ME System Requirements: Pentium processor 150 MHz or higher, 32 mb of RAM, 420 mb free Hard Drive Space, VGA monitor, and a mouse.

But it was generally acknowledged that 64 or 128MB of RAM was best, and the typical install needed 800MB of disk space..

It was also the first Windows to require a Pentium computer, as Win95 and Win98 only required a i486 processor..

Apart from the "Windows Millenium" text across the top, these setup screens are the same as Win98 screens..At right we just completed 50%..

Windows Media Player 7 was a great improvement over the original WMP in Win98, but it was still a poor version with an awful user interface..

Looking back , it is either good or bad that ME didn't came loaded with too many native drivers, the good being that the user and not their compter could choose the best driver for their devices. On the other hand, if you were a novice user this was a terrible idea..

Support for ME ended as scheduled in July 2006 and Microsoft never offered all the updates in a service pack..

But there is an 'unofficial service pack' available at www.majorgeeks.com which includes all the updates for ME..

Thank you screen in ME setup, it seems trivial now but the registration of ME was done by snail mail..

We are up to our first reboot of the system.And the first 'visible change' is the white splash screen when ME starts up..

Now we are ready for the 'hardware detection' and setup phase of the install..

Yikes, the 'blue screen of death' was an annoying defect of dos-based Windows, but this screen is caused by a slow computer..

After the setup we get the License agreement, this version the text is inside of a scrolling field instead of 10 pages long...

And the hardware phase of the setup program has concluded and we are now going to our second reboot..

The pictures were taken in February 2009 , so I cannot remember how long the installation process took..
Up to this time things have gone well, and then activity seems to slow down when we get to this point..

And now we are within 2 minutes of completion, Windows Millenium has installed..

Blurry at this resolution. It reads: Windows Millenium Edition Setup, and next to the drum it says Updating System Settings..
At right the system has 'found' a 'default monitor'.

Here is the initial desktop and background, before the user has installed the display drivers..
At right is the 'View as a webpage' setting which is the one 'update' I always turned off..

and finally the "shutdown menu" which by default showed 'Hibernate' . And that is all................................
Windows ME was a small step in the evolution of Microsoft Windows.

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