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

Support Tools

Windows Me should 'just work' as Microsoft wrote in a press release. So it comes with the 'help & support' center that allows users to get answers to their problems by consulting the online help through a nice and user-friendly interface. But users can also submit a technical problem directly to a Microsoft Tech support engineer through the net and get the answers they need directly in the PCHealth applet.

PCHealth also includes the new System Information applet, which is totally integrated. Like in Windows 98 the system information applet provides accurate information on your system status and offers you launch support applets to tweak or repair the OS. Windows Me is the first operating system with a 'restore' feature with the 'system restore' applet. This tool creates restore points each time you ask or each time you install a software in order to take back your computer to an earlier time if a problem occurs. This restore feature is useful but takes a lot of hard disk space as it creates an hidden restore folder that can contains all the files a software update.

Windows Me also includes a new feature called AutoUpdate which will try and detect when your modem isn't downloading data from the internet and then download updates for the operating system from the web. It is a nice idea which I have yet to see in action.

One of the other good points I should make is how much Microsoft has improved its help files (Now part of PC Health too). They are more detailed than previous releases of Windows 95/98 and tend to help you out with your queries instead of making things more difficult to understand.