Product: Windows Millennium Edition
Company: Microsoft
Website: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsme
Estimated Street Price: Full Version: $209 - Upgrade Version: $109
Buy Windows Me Now - Low Price
Review By: Byron Hinson & Julien Jay

GUI (Graphic User Interface)

Windows Me now adopts the new Windows 2000 GUI. It uses the new stylish grey colour in every Windows' layout. It also comes with new beautiful icons for the 'my computer', 'my network places', 'recycle bin' & 'my documents' shortcuts. The start menu now features a new blue vertical bar with a nice Windows Me logo. Hopefully that is not all, or far from it. The start menu became smart as it automatically resorts itself by hiding the items you use the less and showing only the most used shortcuts.

This feature is a little bit disrupting and thankfully it can be disabled easily. In the start menu tool tips are displayed for some icons if you let your mouse on it: they will explain to users the use of each shortcut. You can now navigate into the tray icons using the TAB key. The control panel, printer, and RAS submenus of the start menu can be easily expandable directly from the start menu to quickly access their contents without opening a folder - it's a time saving feature, first introduced in 1995 by Norton Navigator. The start menu is scrollable but users can choose to display it in multi-column format (like under Windows 95).

The Windows explorer now comes with a 'copy to' & a 'move to' feature: the 'copy to' function allows you to easily copy files from the current folder to one of your choice by selecting the destination in a browser box. It is the same for the 'move to' feature except that it deletes the original files/folders once they're copied. This enhancement is appreciable because it prevents using the painful copy/past commands. Windows Me now uses 'Office 2000' like open/save/save as boxes with a 'my computer' shortcut to quickly access your different drives. The search for files/folders feature has been totally revamped: it now displays an HTML page where you can set your search options. One of the advantages of this revamped feature is for picture files a thumbnail is displayed in the new search window for each file you select (the picture format should be supported.)

The 'run' feature of the start menu is smart as it uses the 'IntelliSense' technology to guess what path you're trying to type and suggests it in a tool tip. As Microsoft wants to make Windows Me a user-friendly operating system, tons of great looking background pictures are now included to make your desktop look more, well, beautiful. Finally you can throw WinZip away with this new release of Windows: it includes a shell integrated ZIP file management: ZIP files are viewed as folders and you can navigate into it very easily. Creating a zip file is as easy as right clicking on a file and select 'send to' ZIP!