I was bored one day and the Microsoft Millennium road show was at the mall across the street. My computer kept rebooting and MS Word kept giving me a stack overflow error. I'm a Nerd. What do you get when you combine all those factors? The overwhelming urge to upgrade your OS. Combine that with the fact that my fellow Nerds at Nerdworld told me it would be a mistake to upgrade to ME, I knew it was time to take the plunge.

My computer is a Dell Inspiron 3000 laptop with a Pentium Processor and two 2.1 GB hard drives. All the software imaginable is either installed on it or has been installed on it at one point and later removed. The laptop has been dropped many times, reconfigured due to ominous "Love Letters" from our secretary and used as a kitchen table for our resident rodent.

Beofre the ME installation my computer took over 2 minutes to boot. Microsoft Outlook express took 2 1/2 minutes to load every time. Shuting down my machine took another 2 minutes. MS Word would give me stack overflows (is that possible?) when trying to use the print preview button. This should make for an interesting upgrade project.

The first task was to clear up some room. I had to clean up space on the C: drive. I only had 86.1 MB free on the drive. Knowing that MS would probably want more space, I deleted Quickbooks pro. Who needs corporate financial statements anyway? That’s what we paid our accountants for. Of course, using the remove option freezes up my computer so I need to resort to deleting everything manually. The install will reset all my settings correctly, shouldn't it?

That freed up over 110 MB of disk space bringing me close to 200MB of free space. I'm thinking that should be enough. I stick in the ME cd-rom, type in that 24 digit security key and start the installation. Oops, not enough memory. I guess I have to free up some more space. I don't need my word files on C: so I'll move them to D:. After all was said and done I ended up with over 600 MB of space. The box said 245–435MB with another 100MB for a backup. I guess I needed a little more space than the average machine. Why am I not surprised?

It's time to re-start the install. I enter in the 24 digit security key again and I am on my way. Timeout. The program freezes - must have been the Norton utilities. I guess I should shut it off during the install. Re-start the install, enter in 24 digit key again.

Hey, we're getting farther. Do I want to back up current system for emergency uninstall? You bet I do. Start the backup. Ran out of space. But I had over 600 MB free! Ok, time to delete that backup. I wonder where it backed up everything?

Once again, I re-start the install, enter in 24 digit security key. System froze...oops, forgot to shut off Norton. Reboot, shut off Norton, re-start the install, enter in 24 digit security key again (why can't it remember the number from the previous 5 tries?). This time I didn’t use the backup option. I’m willing to gamble. This time around the install completes successfully. It took about 45 minutes to install from start to finish in a successful run.

OK, lets open up Outlook Express and see if it is any quicker. I have to look for all those emails that my lady friends must have sent me over the last 2 hours. Outlook express starts to open... it starts to open... it starts to open... and it freezes. I'm sure a hard reboot will fix that! Reboot, open outlook express... it starts to open... starts to open... frozen.

Well, lets try calling tech support. The number is right here in the manual. This should get interesting.

The number is dialed, an auto-attendant answers. Do I want ME support, or Outlook support? I'll take a chance and choose Outlook support. Fully expecting to wait a good 20-30 minutes for a support technician I was pleasantly surprised to immediately hear a "Thank You for calling MS support. May I have your name and product ID number." Gladly. After spending 20 minutes with the technician and his supervisor, we determined that the problem was actually an incompatibility with Norton 95 and MS ME. Norton has an upgrade that I'll probably have to utilize. For now, please don't send me any viruses! I was very pleased with the speed and ease of using tech support, although they only give you 2 free incidents.

End Results
It only takes 1 minute for me to boot up and get to my network login prompt. Just 15 seconds after entering my password, my system is fully functional. A descent improvement, but most likely due to disabling a handful of programs from starting up using msconfig. Windows Explorer now takes only 15 seconds to load up. That too is a significant improvement. Could it be from no Norton? It's possible. We'll see when I reactivate Norton.

Side notes
Like 98, ME has an annoying low disk space notification - it appears whenever my free space is under 65 MB. I think 65 MB is enough for the system drive, but I can't figure out how to shut off the notification. The music is now nicer on the boot up and shut down. It reminds me of the United terminal at O’Hare Airport. The shut down box is now a drop down menu instead of a check box. I kind of like the check box better. It still defaults to your last shut down mode. So if you restart, the next time you shut down it will default to restart. Shouldn't it always default to shut down? MS word still gives me stack overflow.

Benefits from ME? They say it has a new Media Player, which I've tried. It's nice, but not as good as MusicMatch Jukebox. The skins on the Media Player are fun, but the buttons get very lost in most of them. There are also cosmetic changes to the search function and the desktop, but nothing to write home about. The MSN Messenger Service is cool, but most my friends are on ICQ. I haven't had a chance to use Movie Maker yet. That could make the upgrade worth the expense and time, but I wouldn't really utilize them on this old portable. I guess I should have read what the benefits were to upgrading and realized that I personally wouldn't have benefited from them.

Click here to learn more about ME.