Me- maybe not for you, but works for me

[JonMarsh]

Seen a lot of poor press for ME in HTPC systems. As a lark, and on a personal dare (never get in aruguments with yourself), today I installed Windows Me on my bedroom HTPC. With the full uninstall capability retained, of course!
Negative I've heard at other forums include jerky video, problems with audio in DVD playback, etc.
What I found, was that Me gives you NO options for setting configuration when installing, but it DID do a good job of keeping and converting all my old configuration- so a HTPC set up to be lean an mean, with no scheduling agent, no crud hanging around the systray, etc, stayed in that configuration.
Only tried out portions of a few DVD's, some torture tests from "WaterWorld", "Desperados", "Lost in Space", but everything has been smooth sailing, and now finally the shutdown operation is glitch free on my Athlon 750 system.
So, will watch a movie tonight, if anything strange comes up, I'll report. My feeling is, if the system that you upgrade is properly configured for HTPC, it will be very simple to upgrade (this was the fastest, no brain, no choices install I've ever seen from Redmond). But, possibly, if you don't have an optimum HTPC configuraiton, Me will give you no chance to tweak that while installing, and what you THEN wind up with may be very non optimum, as others report.

For reference, my configuration:
ASUS A7V MB
750 MHz Tbird Athlon
128 MB PC133 SDRAM
ELSA Gladiac Geforce 2
Hitachi 8X DVDROM drive
Sound Blaster Live Platinum Sound card, Liveware 3

Resolutions run are 1024X768 and 1280X720.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[ThomasW]

It's going to crash, and we're going to laugh.

Hey I might just get a headstart






theAudioWorx
Klone-Audio

[JonMarsh]

No crash, no laughs (except in the movie), no regrets- so far.

Well, the media player thing is fun to play with for about 10 minutes, but MP3 doesn't sound as good as CD extracted wave files, and they both bite it next to SACD, so that's a big "Who Cares?"

Possibly the only reason for anyone to consder Me is the up to date hardware support, home networking, and the one button configuration restore. Ooops, oh yeah, some of the icons are a little more nifty looking, so if eye candy is your bag....

For fifty bucks? Maybe worthwhile. For the full upgrade price? It's your call.

BTW, getting ready for a new round of software player evaluations, will post results when complete.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Lexman]

Say John, you heard about the new dual Thunderboard Asus coming out? Supposed to be here in November. I think in the spring I will add another 900 t-bird and the Ausus dual socket A! Whew!

These new OS's can be a pain in the butt, that's for sure. So far, with my 2000 install, I had to replace a SCSI card, have not gotten my scanner to work yet (but got info on a new driver today and instructions from Epson's site), and cannot get my Smart and Friendly CD-R rocket replicator to work. No support there, see additional post-

Congrats on the install. I heard Mellinium had no DOS support, :E!

Lex

[Andrew Pratt]

I hate having to pay for service packs to Win98..so went with Win2000

[JonMarsh]

Hi Andrew,

Windows 2000 is a great desktop OS, but unfortunately no one has drivers to support Dolby Digital SPDIF output on any soundcard; been a lot of promises, but with many months gone by, there's still no support. This makes WIN2000 a moot point for HTPC applications.

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[ThomasW]

ME!, not for me, I'm an old fashioned "retro" kind of guy, that like's a proven OS will lots of drivers. So just color Me Win98SE.

Lex,

You're correct, just try and get a DOS window in ME. It doesn't exist.




theAudioWorx
Klone-Audio

[DanB]

Hey I know this is way off topic..but maybe you or Lex can help me..I have built my own PC, using an Asus MB, Intel 815 chipset, 256 MB PC133 RAM, IBM 7200 RPM Ultra 100, etc...I have a CDROM, and a CD Burner..I have heard if you connect a CD-ROM to your primary HD/Cable as a slave, you slow down the HD. Can I hook the Cd burner and CDROM on the same secondary cable?




_____________________________________________

[JonMarsh]

Yes, you're better off hooking the CDR and CDROM on the same channel, as you suggest, the secondary IDE cable.
That's one reason I love the new ABIT and ASUS Tbird MOBO's, with an ATA100 controller AND standard fast EIDE; up to four channels. Think of the bizarre possiblities- HD's, DVD-RAM, CDR, etc.

-Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....

[Lexman]

Well, from a computing power standpoint, and the strength of the OS, 98 cannot touch 2000. Yes, there are application issues which must be resolved, and in fact, some of my equipment might not be compatible. But all the critical path systems will be functional for this installation.

Including Jazz drive, 2 HDs, 32 bit graphics, 256 meg ram, and 900 freekin megahertz! Now that hurts! :B

I needed computing power. I could no longer tollerate the slow speeds of my pitiful 24-26.2 connections! I am still dependent on it for uploads, but not for DLs!

Dan, that sounds right to me. But I haven't really tried it, but it certainly should work-

Lex

[JonMarsh]

Well, if we want to talk industrial performance OS's, even though hampered occasionally by compatibility problems, how about my deskside Athlon system- 98SE for backwards compatibility, BeOS for serious graphics and video speed. BeOS reads FAT16, FAT32, MacIntosh, several flavors of Linux, and oh yes, NTFS file system. Full 64 bit journalled file system, fully multithreaded OS with SMP support in the box up to 16 processors- and better load balancing than NT. And no, it doesn't have DD output either!!

Regards,

Jon




Earth First!
_______________________________
We'll screw up the other planets later....