Windows Millennium and a "New" Computer
By William LaMartin, Editor, Tampa PC Users Group
lamartin@tampabay.rr.com
Some Background By now, most members probably know about the projector our group recently purchased. Certainly those attending our August general meeting or the most recent VBA SIG do, since the projector was used at those meetings. I will leave it to Merle Nicholson, the member responsible for starting the projector fund and who had the faith that we could indeed raise the money to make such a purchase, to give the details of the purchase somewhere else in this newsletter. What I want to talk about is what I bought for myself at the same going-out-of-business sale where the projector was purchased.
At the August meeting an announcement was made regarding this sale, and a number of members of the group made purchases, myself included, with which, I think, all are quite happy. We owe member Tom Cone thanks for alerting us to the sale.
I bought a Compaq computer that had Win 95 OSR2 on it. It also had a small 3.2 GB hard drive, so the first thing I did was to buy a 20 GB drive and install Windows Millennium on it. You might ask how I have Windows Millennium now when it is not due until the middle of September. Actually I have an OEM version, intended for installation on new computers, which I purchased from Steve Singer at RDI. You can get an OEM version from a dealer if you buy a new motherboard or hard drive, as I did. I purchased a 20 GB Seagate drive and Windows Me. The final price of the Compaq 333 Pentium II computer with 128 KB of RAM, and now with a 20 GB hard drive, 24 Speed CD, external 56K modem, sound card, speakers and network card was around $1,000, plus tax plus the price of Windows Me ( I would have had to eventually buy the Windows Me anyway, so I won't include that in the price).
Oh, you say, I overpaid . Not really, since I failed to mention that the system also included a ViewSonic ViewPanel VP 150 15" flat screen monitor—a $1,000 monitor for $500.
Actually I bought the monitor and then added the computer as an afterthought. I love that type of monitor. The Gateway Pentium III we got in December had one, but that computer is used mainly by my daughter, and I was still stuck with a regular 17" monitor (which used to be state of the art for me). The flat screen monitor takes up almost no space and displays a 15" diagonal image—almost the same size displayed by the much larger 17" regular monitor. Not to be outdone on the monitor front, Wade Herman got one also, and my son said he would reimburse me if I got one for him too, which I did and he did.
Installing the Drive I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out how to get what's known as the Compaq diagnostic partition on the new drive. It is something unique to Compaq--a hidden partition with diagnostic software. I could get software at their web site that would install the partition. It was probably there, and I just couldn’t find it. I then decided to see if the partition was on the drive that came with the computer. So I installed Partition Magic (to be able to see hidden partitions)--and it wasn't there. Perhaps on newer Compaq computers they quit using this partition. Anyway you can download the same diagnostic software that you install as you would any other Windows program.
Windows Millennium Once I decided to not worry about the Compaq diagnostic partition, I simply installed the drive in the computer, put the Windows Me CD in the CD ROM, made sure in the BIOS that the computer would boot from the CD drive, turned off the computer, switched the cable and power to the new drive and booted up. It took 10 to 12 minutes for the setup to format the 20 GB drive, and the setup took just 14 minutes to install everything. It then restarted the computer and began to set up the hardware and Plug and Play devices and do various other setup things. This took about 15 minutes. This computer has a video card, sound card, network card, and external modem.
After a total of 41 minutes (12 +14 + 15), Windows Me was running for first time. I got a Windows logon instead of a Network logon, so there was a bit of network stuff yet to do. And after 3 more minutes it finished. I noted that it didn't pick up my video card and I only had 640 x 480 resolution at the moment, but it did get the ViewSonic monitor. And after setting up a network TCP/IP address for the computer and a reboot, I got a message that I needed to accept some agreement for my Alps printer (which is attached to another computer on the network)--so I now had networking. After doing that and another reboot, I got the Network logon.
It still didn’t have the correct driver for the video card, so I needed to install that, which I had already downloaded from ATI. Since that file is over 7 MB, it is lucky that I am on a network to the Gateway where the driver was.
The video driver installed perfectly. I then installed a USB network adapter in addition to the network card already installed so that I can connect to Road Runner when I want using the USB adapter.
What’s New There is no Windows Explorer anymore under Start | Programs. Ah, but I did find it in Accessories. And when you click on My Computer on the desktop, you see your local drives but not the network. To see the Network, you need to click on the My Network Places link on the left portion of the window or on the MyNetwork Places icon on the desktop--what used to be called Network Neighborhood.
And—this is a big one—there doesn’t appear to be a DOS prompt. There is no option on Shutdown to restart in DOS mode. There is also no entry on the Start menu for a DOS window. But Command.Com is still there so you can run it from Start | Run, or you can create your own Program Entry for the MS-DOS Prompt as I just did. If you want to get to the real DOS prompt, you will need to create a Windows Millennium Startup disk and boot from it.
Millennium is much like Windows 98, except for some slight changes in appearance of the various Windows like what I just mentioned about MyComputer. There are, however, several new features worth noting. They are
System Restore is similar to GoBack (see the article by Mary Sheridan in our December 1999 newsletter ) and such programs which return your computer to an earlier time of your choosing. Furthermore you lose none of your work that has been saved in the MyDocuments Folder. I used this feature a day after getting the computer up and running. Needing a virus protection program, I installed a version of McAfee Virus Scan I had, then went to the Internet and downloaded their update of the program. Unfortunately the update never would complete its installation. I gave up on McAfee, used Add/Remove to uninstall what I could of McAfee and then did a System Restoration to when I first booted the computer that day. I then successfully installed Norton’s antiviral program. Note that System Restore requires at least 200 MB of hard disk space; the more you give it to use (up to 2.4 GB), of course, the better it works. So this is not for older systems with small hard drives.
System File Protection will not allow any file that is important to Windows to be deleted or over written by an improper version. This should be a big help with what is known as DLL Hell, where the installation of a program results in its old and possibly defective DLLs replacing ones that were on your computer.
It seems to boot and shutdown down faster than 98. It certainly opens some programs very fast—especially the Microsoft Office products. This, however, may be due to how the Office programs are structured. I didn’t notice any improvement in the opening of programs like Delphi or Corel Draw.
I will take Microsoft’s word that networking has been made almost foolproof, since I already have a network up and running and thus didn’t need that feature.
Regarding networking, though, there does seem to be something happening in the background that I would like to be able to stop since it slows things down considerably. When I access another computer on the network from the new computer, after I get to the directory I want and begin to, say, select some files for copying, things sometimes move very slowly. I think some aspect of Windows Me is possibly indexing the network drive and directory. When I access a directory on the Windows Me computer from another computer on the network, nothing like this happens. I would be interesting in hearing any ideas on this.
I didn’t think much of the Movie Maker Program. It seemed sort of primitive to me. You can string together videos, still images and sound, but I saw no option to superimpose text. I suppose it is to real Video editing programs what Paint Brush is to real graphic programs like Corel Draw and Adobe Illustrator.
Not to end on a negative note, I think it is worth the upgrade from 98—especially at the prices I have seen quoted of $49 from Buy.Com and $59 from Microsoft. Of course, these are prerelease prices. I think the price after the September 14 release will be $109 from Microsoft for the upgrade and $209 for the regular version.
Minimum Requirements: