Windows 98 or ME? what is better..

[davidovitch]

Sorry if this is an annoying topic to you people (not to mention maybe it's in the wrong forum), but I really don't know. Should I use windows 98 or windows ME? It's for a pentium 2 (or 3, I'm not sure) with 64MB RAM.

Thanks for any advice!

PS: Or should I just get some extra RAM and use XP

[RJ]

With 64 MB of RAM I'd use Windows 98.

But extra RAM (256 MB as minimum) + Windows XP sounds like the best choice.

RJ

[bermuda]

I've been running XP for 3 years now at my overclocked celeron (374Mhz), 160MB RAM and believe it or not, but it goes smootly!

[eldon]

Between the two choices of me or 98 I prefered 98 above the me version,I never had problems with 98 and I then went to me and after a few weeks went back to 98se.Now I have xp, and if given a chance and your system specs can handle xp, then I would use xp if I were you.

[Panama Red]

Here's MS's minimum recommendations for XP. If you're running an older PII or PIII, I'd lean toward 98se. XP is great, ME is weak but getting your system to meet the XP specs just to run smoothly would be a waste of money, IMO.

[sdkfz]

Assuming that you own 98 and ME already, I'd go for Win 98 as others have mentioned over Win Many Errors. I also upgraded to ME on a (then) new PC purchase and after weirdness etc 'upgraded' ME to 98.

XP is even better than both in my opinion, but the system needs to be more robust to handle it and with 64 MB of RAM you would see a dramatic slow down in system speed vs either 98 or ME. Since there are few programs/games that MUST have XP - Doom 3 is the only one that comes to mind - you would not be limiting yourself in software much if at all - and Doom 3 would probably not run on this machine anyway at anything near a rasonable frame rate if the system even meets the other specs.

On the other hand there are several issues with XP and older software that must be run in compatability mode just to run on the XP NT kernal so having a machine to run these would be nice.

Oh yeah - this is not an annoyance...

[RayH]

ME over 98FE. 98SE over the both.

[MrAustin]

Again another vote for 98SE (FE is garbage ... though not compared to ME, heh)

[Mesaeus]

If it's got 256Mb memory (you can upgrade that 64Mb) and it's 300 Megahertz or above, I would go for XP. If not, 98SE is the way to go.

[kram 2.0]

WinME is the arguably one of the worst products to ever come out of MS IMHO. It's very instable and never actually works well at all at any hardware environment. I'd think you should aim at WinXP Home or Win2000 as PR suggested, but otherwise, Win98SE I use right now, and it's still very reliable IMO.

Hope that helps,
kram