Windows ME

[dynomike27]

I know that this is the wrong message boards, but I have a really important question. How do you improve system resources in Windows Millenium Edition? Is there software that could do it, or what? I would go to windows XP, but a lot of my programs aren't compatable for windows XP.

Thanks

[dynomike27]

I know that this is the wrong message boards, but I have a really important question. How do you improve system resources in Windows Millenium Edition? Is there software that could do it, or what? I would go to windows XP, but a lot of my programs aren't compatable for windows XP.

Thanks

[Ed Hansberry]

There is not much you can do. How do you know your apps aren't compatible with XP? Most things (besides some really old games) should work with no problem, and those that have glitches can usually be fixed by having XP run them in compatibility mode. THere are 4 settings:
Win95
Win98/ME
WinNT4 SP5
Win2K

I've never had to use that though.

[Janak Parekh]

(I moved the post to the Off-Topic forum where it really belongs.)

One of the fundamental problems in Win95, 98 and Me was the resource pool limits. I agree with Ed: unless you're running things like DOS games, most software should run flawlessly under XP. I've got rid of every 95/98/Me machine I've had about a year ago and haven't looked back.

--janak

[Kati Compton]

Actually, I've found that old DOS games run better on XP than they did on 98....

[Janak Parekh]

Originally Posted by kati42

Actually, I've found that old DOS games run better on XP than they did on 98....

Depends on HOW old, I guess. If they only worked in the DOS-only mode and wrote directly to graphics hardware, I'd be real surprised to see them running on XP.

Admittedly, I haven't tried to play Commander Keen anytime recently.

--janak

[Kati Compton]

Originally Posted by Janak Parekh

Depends on HOW old, I guess. If they only worked in the DOS-only mode and wrote directly to graphics hardware, I'd be real surprised to see them running on XP.

Admittedly, I haven't tried to play Commander Keen anytime recently.

I was more thinking Monkey Island and a few other LucasArts games.

[Ed Hansberry]

I was actually thinking of older Win95 games that require VXd's or even fail to install because the installer misinterprets the 2GB+ of free space as negative space. I have a few of those for the kids and they simply don't work.

[Janak Parekh]

Originally Posted by kati42

I was more thinking Monkey Island and a few other LucasArts games.

Monkey Island, which is one of my all-time favorites, is an interesting game. It has very, very little WAV and other sounds for which it writes directly to the sound driver. In fact, you can live without those sounds for the most part. Most of the game's sounds (the cool music) was just CD tracks that the game would play.

Thanks for letting me know, BTW, that it works under XP. I might just play it again. That game was a barrel of monkeys, literally. Now, The 7th Guest might be a wee bit more difficult to get running...

--janak

[thepalmdefender]

Originally Posted by Ed Hansberry

I was actually thinking of older Win95 games that require VXd's or even fail to install because the installer misinterprets the 2GB+ of free space as negative space. I have a few of those for the kids and they simply don't work.

maybe keep an extra 1.8gb FAT32 partition just to make those games happy then?

[Dave Beauvais]

Originally Posted by Janak Parekh

... Now, The 7th Guest might be a wee bit more difficult to get running...

Wow, now there's a memory... I absolutely loved that game! It was certainly groundbreaking at the time. (But I remember working on some of those puzzles for a long time.) I bought the sequel, The 11th Hour, but never got past the first puzzle. Not because it was too hard, but because the game ran so damn slow on the PC I had at the time. It met the minimum requirements -- barely -- but ran so slow as to be unplayable. (I was using a 486DX2 66 MHz, if I recall correctly.) I still have it on a shelf at home now that I think about it. I'm sure it would play very well on a machine with a 52X CD-ROM, GeForce 4, a 1 GHz PIII, and a 1 GB of RAM. Too bad I'd probably have to install Win98 or find some old DOS install disks to get it to work.

--Dave