Book Review: Windows Me Annoyances
Summary: Readable, covers a small number of topics
in depth; good insights into GUI
With Windows XP soon upon us, please pity the few hundred thousand ME users who are stuck with a dead-end OS. ME was really only a stopgap solution, a way to implement new features in Win 98 while Microsoft worked on XP. Some of these features included system restore, an image viewer, better multimedia and better hardware support. ME inherited a lot of Win 98 stuff while being new enough to force users to pay for software updates (including Photoshop, Norton Anti-Virus and Home Site).
Typically, a first release of a OS is buggy, and after a few years, it really becomes robust and useful. But after XP is released, it is unlikely that consumers will buy ME anymore or that OEM manufacturers will ship computers with it. It also is unlikely that Microsoft will release a service pack, now that its efforts are focused on XP. That means that the people unfortunate enough to have bought consumer PC's during the intervening year will be using a legacy OS with diminishing support for new hardware and software.
This minority will need to solve problems on their own, using books like this one. This excellent book goes over the differences between ME and 98, ME Secrets and ways to tweak the registry for certain things. The first part is interesting from a usability point of view. It covers the user interface in thorough detail, with shortcuts and insights as to why Microsoft chose a particular solution. ( A good number of these tricks can be found elsewhere, but I found several new ones: such as using Microsoft Family Logon for a security, tweaking the search tool, removing stubborn icons, disabling autorun for CDROMS and stop Windows from randomly checking your floppy drive).
The book contains an excellent appendix on DOS, a fairly thorough guide to what System Restore does and a good troubleshooting guide to hardware installations. It also contains an outstanding discussion of file associations and how to change or preserve them. I also found the section on error messages and general protection faults to be unusually helpful. Several other chapters (which didn't especially interest me) focused on editing the registry and vb scripts to automate windows tasks.
Topics I would have liked to see more coverage on was software installations and plugins. Particularly, removing and reinstalling programs and especially MS Office. Recently I installed and reinstalled Office 2000 and found the error messages from ME and Office very confusing. I realize this is an OS book, not a book on applications, but still it would have been nice to know some procedures for managing software installations. Also, there was not much discussion on Windows Update, which seems to cause a lot of problems.
Perhaps it is unfair to point this out, but the best source of information for ME troubleshooting seems to be news groups and the MS site, not books like these. Although this book was published later than the first dozen or so and seems to be more carefully written, no one can expect it to contain info about the latest bugs and fixes. Newsgroups have informed me about bugs related to Norton AV, Windows Update and helped me figure out the ME doesn't support RAM over 512 MB.(!!!) You wouldn't find solutions to these problems from these books.
Another book I highly recommend is Ed Bott's "Special Edition Using Windows Me," which is a little bigger, a little easier to read, with more more screenshots and a little more thorough treatment of the OS. The Bott book tends to have info about multimedia and extras like msn messenger, while the Oreilly book is more readable and discusses a few topics in depth.
