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Service Pack for Windows ME


the_guy

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Hello all ;)

I've always felt sad no official sp for ME was ever made and am glad a few peeps here took the efford to create their own. Unfortunately I'm using a dutch version of ME.

I've been reading on these forums for a couple of years now and am wondering if theres anything I could do to help create a dutch version of the service pack.

Unfortunately the french version of the service pack seems to be unavailable or I could've compared the 2 versions and 'modded' a dutch version from the english version.

I suppose a dutch version of this sp was never made or started?

the same is true for me. I would love a german version.

Because the SP makes ME really more stable and fixes lots of stuff I use now a english ME, for the SP alone..

As far as I can see the main problem is not only translation but hotfixes that are available only in US-English. Thanks to MDGX who has them all on his homepage.

We need to know which of these fixes can be applied to non-US Windows without breaking things. Most "behind the scene" dlls, like the ACPI and IO-Subsystem would be ok I would guess. Troublesome is everything that has an effect to User applications like the RestoreUI and so.

:unsure:

Unfortunately I don't own an english version of ME.

I'm well aware some of these updates won't work on a non-english version of ME but I suppose that atleast some of the hotfixes, even though they may be english, will actually work on a non-english version.

As I use a lot of english software on my dutch windows I wouldn't realy mind if a few minor portions of my OS are in english because of the english hotfixes, I don't think many dutch people still using ME would realy mind that.

I've found the hard way it's becoming quite tedious to find these hotfixes nowdays. I do own the dutch version of the MS security cd which has some files for 9x

Does anyone still have the french version of the SP and if so, could they please upload it somewhere? nvm, found it on the MDGx site :)

btw, the dutch version of ME also comes on 2 disks ;)

Edited by Dutch Delight
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  • 2 months later...

Why Make A Service Pack For Windows ME?

I Used To Like ME Untill I Found Out About Its Horrible DOS Compatibility. So Thats Why I Stick With 95 & 98 For DOS Games

ME is not for DOS-Freaks.

ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.

ME is the most evolved Win9x OS and is more stable than 95,98 and SE.

Don't buy the "Me is Beta" phrase that everybody badmouthes ME. The Truth : it shipped with prereleases of IE 5.5 and WMP 7.0, now what's that about - install IE 5.5 final or IE6 and WMP 7.1 or 9 and voila everythings solved. In fact the german ME edition came on two CDROMs : one OS, and one with WMP 7.0 final plus some bonus stuff to satisfy customers. The systemresore bug is a bug indeed, but theres a well-known and available hotfix and afterwards its solved. Systemresore works exactly like in XP and it is very reliable.

It's few glitches can all be worked out, in generally it depends all on compatible Drivers : ME had the same problem as vista - when it came out there were only 98 drivers around, but ME wants WDM only. Otherwise ACPI wont work and system stability is in danger.Another thing to consider is that ME needs a lot of CPU power and RAM. 500 MhZ and far more than 128 MB will work wonders.

ME has capabilities not found elsewhere in win 9x :

  • full ACPI aware: improving cold boot time, pre and post-logon boot times and time required for resuming from hibernation, OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state and other power management features without manufacturer-supplied drivers
  • WDM Driver modell throughout the OS, less use of VXDs for more stability. Needed for ACPI to work its magic.
  • Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) instead of TWAIN , still used in XP, support for PICT-Cameras and Scanners ( lots modern devices use this protocol ).
  • Universal Plug and Play ( UpNp) , detects devices on the network automatically.
  • Built in Windows 2000 TCP/IP and NDIS networking stack and architecture, more reliable, full-featured, stable and offered better performance over the 98SE stack .
  • Support for networking over FireWire, IrDA, ( Bluetooth capable with 3rd party drivers like Toshibas famous stack ) a network diagnostic troubleshooter, outstanding Home Networking Wizard which let people share folders,printers or set up a connection-sharing with offline-machines.
  • native USB support for Mass-storage Devices and external CD/DVD devices, better USB-printer support.
  • native Firewire support, for DV-Camcorders and the like (think of the Moviemaker application )
  • far better memory handling than 98SE, especially if more than 256MB Ram is present. Depending on mainboard you wont have to workaround the 512MB - "bug", I have seen PCs with 1GB and ME without any tweak running stable.
  • Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) , Distributed COM+ ,MDAC and JET database working in background like in XP, mainly used for diagnostic-wizards and the PC-Health services like :
  • SystemRestore, automatic Regstry backups,Signature-Checkers for Files ( ME uses *.CAT files like 2000 and XP ), resulting in System File Protection, automatic recovery of overwritten or deleted core-files ( that's why a Servicepack is hard work, you cannot simply overwrite OS-files with custom ones )
  • Help and Support Center is by far more userfriendly and interesting to use than 98SE's HTMl-Help. You can access the Microsoft Knowledgebase / Support website inside this application. When you click on the support options you get access to DXdiag,Systeminfo, WMI,Dr Watson and all other system-diagnosis tools. Built in wizards and Troubleshooters.
  • Multimedia inside, unseen in any Consumer-OS before : MovieMaker , WMP , Internet Games, DirectX Voice chat,DVD,Onlinestuff, MS Agent "merlin" as your talking OOBE- wizard makes this the total multimedia-Windows out of the Box .
  • DVD player supports software decoding for playback of DVD movies without a dedicated decoder card

Better and feature rich Windows 2000 like Explorer :


  • Image Preview: In Windows Me, images can be viewed by using the Image Preview utility. It allows users to rotate an image, print or zoom in/out an image. Image Preview supports images with .BMP, .DIB, .EMF, .GIF, .JPEG, .PNG, .TIF and .WMF file formats.
  • Compressed Folders: Windows Me includes support for ZIP files through a shell extension known as Compressed Folders; allows users to create, access and extract files from ZIP archives similar to a regular folder in Windows. The user can also restrict access to files with a password.
  • Search facility is integrated into Windows Explorer ( very much like the XP one )
  • Accessibility extras : Onscreen Keyboard,magnifier, Speech .. prettty good for people that need it.

Well.. that's not all, but the topnotch argument to choose this over 98 my friend.

last my own extra Remark : I have a MS wired keyboard 500 with multimedia buttons, pause/play/Home/Favorites/Calc and such..

In Windows 98 and 2000 I need " the Intellitype software" to make them work..

Only In ME and XP they work without any running software at all ;-)

Those little surprises are worth it, believe it or not..

Like I said it is NOT for DOS-freaks..

but for XP-feature seeking and multimedia-loving people on older or less powerful hardware or the need to have games and apps running fast as possible ( I do a lot of Photoshop 7, Poser 5 on a 256MB equipped ME Machine - dont even think of that under XP !). :thumbup

yer good one smartie

windows me is the best

i rather have it then windows 98 becasue i never had a problom with win me but probloms with windows 98 like needing to get drivers for usbs from the internet and really slowing down after a year use (i only played games on it like pharaoh)

and dont say win 98 is faster becasue win me boots much faster then my 98 machine

i mean you gotta tweak win me a bit like get rid of sfp and system restore and once thats gones it a great and stable

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  • 4 weeks later...
ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.

Windows ME was definitely marketed and built for consumers/home users, not for business operations. Business & corporate users have steered clear of ME.

smartie77, I also found out that WinME has an improved version of the Spider Solitaire game that included options of choosing difficulty settings, which was not found in the Plus!98 edition of Spider Solitaire. My HP Pavilion 7840 desktop PC came pre-installed with ME back in early 2001.

btw, I may have plans to make an updated version of the unofficial ME SP this summer, if and only if the_guy (original creator of the ME SP) has no longer interest in making a new one. has anyone heard from the_guy lately?

Edited by erpdude8
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ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.

Windows ME was definitely marketed and built for consumers/home users, not for business operations. Business & corporate users have steered clear of ME.

smartie77, I also found out that WinME has an improved version of the Spider Solitaire game that included options of choosing difficulty settings, which was not found in the Plus!98 edition of Spider Solitaire. My HP Pavilion 7840 desktop PC came pre-installed with ME back in early 2001.

btw, I may have plans to make an updated version of the unofficial ME SP this summer, if and only if the_guy (original creator of the ME SP) has no longer interest in making a new one. has anyone heard from the_guy lately?

i dont think so

hes probloy doing work or school or some thing

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btw, I may have plans to make an updated version of the unofficial ME SP this summer, if and only if the_guy (original creator of the ME SP) has no longer interest in making a new one. has anyone heard from the_guy lately?

We haven't seen him for quite a while. You could PM him if you wanna know more I guess.

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  • 2 weeks later...

the_guy hasn't posted in this topic since Oct 2, 2007 erpdude8

What with 9 months to be born, 9 months to declare a project abandoned is a fairly safe measure

Best to get mod/admin approval jic though, even if no one appears to know what happened

After 2 yrs of dedicated commitment, on the verge of an RC, without a word to at least you or MDGx, is a bit odd

I do hope he and his loved ones are ok.

I'm pretty sure, that most of us know you'll do the right thing by him, if/when you do take it over... even us lurkers ;)

I'd hate to see all the effort everyone has put into this, to be just left hanging on the edge of completion.

If nothing else, it should be finished in memorial jic, he deserves that much regardless.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Why Make A Service Pack For Windows ME?

I Used To Like ME Untill I Found Out About Its Horrible DOS Compatibility. So Thats Why I Stick With 95 & 98 For DOS Games

ME is not for DOS-Freaks.

ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.

ME is the most evolved Win9x OS and is more stable than 95,98 and SE.

Don't buy the "Me is Beta" phrase that everybody badmouthes ME. The Truth : it shipped with prereleases of IE 5.5 and WMP 7.0, now what's that about - install IE 5.5 final or IE6 and WMP 7.1 or 9 and voila everythings solved. In fact the german ME edition came on two CDROMs : one OS, and one with WMP 7.0 final plus some bonus stuff to satisfy customers. The systemresore bug is a bug indeed, but theres a well-known and available hotfix and afterwards its solved. Systemresore works exactly like in XP and it is very reliable.

It's few glitches can all be worked out, in generally it depends all on compatible Drivers : ME had the same problem as vista - when it came out there were only 98 drivers around, but ME wants WDM only. Otherwise ACPI wont work and system stability is in danger.Another thing to consider is that ME needs a lot of CPU power and RAM. 500 MhZ and far more than 128 MB will work wonders.

ME has capabilities not found elsewhere in win 9x :

  • full ACPI aware: improving cold boot time, pre and post-logon boot times and time required for resuming from hibernation, OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state and other power management features without manufacturer-supplied drivers
  • WDM Driver modell throughout the OS, less use of VXDs for more stability. Needed for ACPI to work its magic.
  • Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) instead of TWAIN , still used in XP, support for PICT-Cameras and Scanners ( lots modern devices use this protocol ).
  • Universal Plug and Play ( UpNp) , detects devices on the network automatically.
  • Built in Windows 2000 TCP/IP and NDIS networking stack and architecture, more reliable, full-featured, stable and offered better performance over the 98SE stack .
  • Support for networking over FireWire, IrDA, ( Bluetooth capable with 3rd party drivers like Toshibas famous stack ) a network diagnostic troubleshooter, outstanding Home Networking Wizard which let people share folders,printers or set up a connection-sharing with offline-machines.
  • native USB support for Mass-storage Devices and external CD/DVD devices, better USB-printer support.
  • native Firewire support, for DV-Camcorders and the like (think of the Moviemaker application )
  • far better memory handling than 98SE, especially if more than 256MB Ram is present. Depending on mainboard you wont have to workaround the 512MB - "bug", I have seen PCs with 1GB and ME without any tweak running stable.
  • Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) , Distributed COM+ ,MDAC and JET database working in background like in XP, mainly used for diagnostic-wizards and the PC-Health services like :
  • SystemRestore, automatic Regstry backups,Signature-Checkers for Files ( ME uses *.CAT files like 2000 and XP ), resulting in System File Protection, automatic recovery of overwritten or deleted core-files ( that's why a Servicepack is hard work, you cannot simply overwrite OS-files with custom ones )
  • Help and Support Center is by far more userfriendly and interesting to use than 98SE's HTMl-Help. You can access the Microsoft Knowledgebase / Support website inside this application. When you click on the support options you get access to DXdiag,Systeminfo, WMI,Dr Watson and all other system-diagnosis tools. Built in wizards and Troubleshooters.
  • Multimedia inside, unseen in any Consumer-OS before : MovieMaker , WMP , Internet Games, DirectX Voice chat,DVD,Onlinestuff, MS Agent "merlin" as your talking OOBE- wizard makes this the total multimedia-Windows out of the Box .
  • DVD player supports software decoding for playback of DVD movies without a dedicated decoder card

Better and feature rich Windows 2000 like Explorer :


  • Image Preview: In Windows Me, images can be viewed by using the Image Preview utility. It allows users to rotate an image, print or zoom in/out an image. Image Preview supports images with .BMP, .DIB, .EMF, .GIF, .JPEG, .PNG, .TIF and .WMF file formats.
  • Compressed Folders: Windows Me includes support for ZIP files through a shell extension known as Compressed Folders; allows users to create, access and extract files from ZIP archives similar to a regular folder in Windows. The user can also restrict access to files with a password.
  • Search facility is integrated into Windows Explorer ( very much like the XP one )
  • Accessibility extras : Onscreen Keyboard,magnifier, Speech .. prettty good for people that need it.

Well.. that's not all, but the topnotch argument to choose this over 98 my friend.

last my own extra Remark : I have a MS wired keyboard 500 with multimedia buttons, pause/play/Home/Favorites/Calc and such..

In Windows 98 and 2000 I need " the Intellitype software" to make them work..

Only In ME and XP they work without any running software at all ;-)

Those little surprises are worth it, believe it or not..

Like I said it is NOT for DOS-freaks..

but for XP-feature seeking and multimedia-loving people on older or less powerful hardware or the need to have games and apps running fast as possible ( I do a lot of Photoshop 7, Poser 5 on a 256MB equipped ME Machine - dont even think of that under XP !). :thumbup

Windows Me is MODERN? and it is MORE STABLE THAN 98 AND 95?

Are you serious? I just need to know.

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I am testing the service pack's stability improvements

after 22 hours of a normal day use of a low traffic HTTP webserver

Windows me continue to show signs of high stability

before the service pack

it would be quite unstable after 12 hours

and VERY unstable after 1 day uptime

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  • 6 months later...
Like I said it is NOT for DOS-freaks..
Sorry... I couldn't resist... ;)

What do you mean?

I'm a DOS "freak", and I've been playing native DOS games, and been using native DOS programs in native MS-DOS 8.00, outside WinME GUI for a long time. ;)

One just needs to apply 1 of these WinME dos patches to regain access to AUTOEXEC.BAT + CONFIG.SYS, and then reboot to native DOS by tweaking MSDOS.SYS.

That's pretty much it, besides learning how to play old DOS games with alternate/3rd party DOS memory managers, eventually UMBPCI.SYS (if allowed by mobo chipset/BIOS) + tools, like a true DOS "freak" does.

Signed,

Just another proud DOS "freak"

HTH

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I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm working on a project similar to this @ WPC.

Check it out!

It has similar goals to this service pack however I plan on adding support for KernelEX and several other GUI updates while also adding just about all unofficial updates from MDGX's site.

Whatever you do, please just finish it. Its so many unofficial packs that needs finishing.

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I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm working on a project similar to this @ WPC.

Check it out!

It has similar goals to this service pack however I plan on adding support for KernelEX and several other GUI updates while also adding just about all unofficial updates from MDGX's site.

Whatever you do, please just finish it. Its so many unofficial packs that needs finishing.

I will. Just about finished with alpha 2 at the moment. Expect a release later next week.

On an unrelated note, it's snowing/ raining/ sleeting it's butt off here. About an inch of ICE! Hopefully power doesn't go out.

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I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm working on a project similar to this @ WPC.

Check it out!

It has similar goals to this service pack however I plan on adding support for KernelEX and several other GUI updates while also adding just about all unofficial updates from MDGX's site.

I did check it out, and I guess we should give you more exposure for this "revamped" ME SP... :thumbup

Check it out here:

http://www.mdgx.com/web.htm#ME1

and here:

http://www.mdgx.com/upd98me.php#012910

* Unofficial Windows ME Service Pack 2 (SP2) Alpha 1 installs ALL previously released Hotfixes, Patches + Updates (free):

http://www.winprj.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=781

ME SP2 [4.07 MB, English]:

http://www.mdgx.com/spx/MESP2.EXE

Requires MS IE 6.0 SP1 already installed:

http://www.mdgx.com/toy.htm#IEX

P.S.:

Pls PM me when you have a new edition of your SP, so I can upload it at my site and post links @ the pages above.

Tx

Keep up the good work!

HTH

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I just wanted to let you guys know that I'm working on a project similar to this @ WPC.

Check it out!

It has similar goals to this service pack however I plan on adding support for KernelEX and several other GUI updates while also adding just about all unofficial updates from MDGX's site.

I did check it out, and I guess we should give you more exposure for this "revamped" ME SP... :thumbup

Check it out here:

http://www.mdgx.com/web.htm#ME1

and here:

http://www.mdgx.com/upd98me.php#012910

* Unofficial Windows ME Service Pack 2 (SP2) Alpha 1 installs ALL previously released Hotfixes, Patches + Updates (free):

http://www.winprj.net/board/viewtopic.php?t=781

ME SP2 [4.07 MB, English]:

http://www.mdgx.com/spx/MESP2.EXE

Requires MS IE 6.0 SP1 already installed:

http://www.mdgx.com/toy.htm#IEX

P.S.:

Pls PM me when you have a new edition of your SP, so I can upload it at my site and post links @ the pages above.

Tx

Keep up the good work!

HTH

Thanks man! I would've replied to you sooner, but I've been gone due to bad weather (one inch of snow and ice mixed). Due to that, Alpha 2 has been delayed further. I was gonna release it tommorrow, but it seems that it will be released this weekend. Oh and wish me good luck on my writing assessment this Wednesday.

Edited by computerwizkid
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