Windows Millennium Edition offers several compelling reasons to make the move from Win98 or Win98 Second Edition. Above all, it's probably the first Windows operating system aimed squarely at the home user and the SOHO crowd, with no real attempt made to handle the needs of corporate users.

Windows 2000 Professional is currently the OS of choice for every business except the truly small office, and a far better choice than WinNT Workstation 4.0. With the success of Win2000, the Win9x system no longer has to fulfill users' multimedia and usability needs, which NT Workstation never came close to doing.

To that end, Microsoft has therefore steered Millennium Edition away from the legacy hardware and software that plagues business systems and focused instead on the kind of plug and play, full-featured multimedia and home networking system it had tried to achieve with Win98 and Win98SE. The change is so significant that Microsoft has dubbed the new OS Windows Me. How noncorporate can you get?

Gone is full support for legacy hardware. Gone to an important degree is access to DOS itself. Multimedia features pick up the slack, as do the easiest home networking installation features Microsoft has ever included in an OS. Windows Me boasts a decent little movie creator and editor, a richly featured Media Player, a system for capturing and storing images, major support for games, and the Internet as part of everything. Setting up a home network is mostly a matter of running a few well-designed wizards, and a new help system provides a different perspective on help, drawing in a larger range of resources, including a wealth of Web documents. Also, the entire environment is more foolproof and stable than the Win9x line it replaces, with system files protected against accidental -- and even most intentional -- deletions or alterations. A feature called System Restore can return Me to an earlier state in which the conflicts or slowdowns you're experiencing hadn't yet happened. (For more on WinMe positives and negatives, as well as insight into whether you should even install this version of Windows, see our final review of the product: Windows Me: Final Verdict.)

Whether you need WinMe is entirely up to you, of course. If you buy a new computer, you likely won't have a choice -- Me is already showing up on new systems, both desktop and notebook -- but if you now run Win98 or Win98SE you won't have any trouble continuing, at least for a time, with your current OS. As was the case with Win95 to Win98 upgrades a few years back, however, eventually you'll want to upgrade anyway, since Me will be the system of choice for software and hardware producers. Another reason to upgrade is that Me represents the true transition point between the DOS-based line of operating systems and the upcoming merger of that line with the Windows NT line. Currently code-named Whistler, the 9x-2000 merger is in beta testing and will incorporate the best of both OS lines. The best way to see what the new line will offer is to become thoroughly familiar with Windows Me.

In this article we offer you a guide to everything you need to know about installing WinMe. We're confident we have the answers, because we've installed WinMe over and over again, on several different systems, under a wide range of conditions, and in a variety of situations. We've installed it on newly formatted hard drives, on badly cluttered Win98 drives, on systems that dual-booted with NT 4.0, and even on systems that had Win98 installed along with Win2000 Pro and Red Hat Linux. The results were varied, as you'd expect, but for the most part we found the installation easier than any other Windows installation has been to date. Upgrading from Win98/98SE proved especially problem-free, with Me effortlessly (for the most part) adopting Win98's existing configurations for hardware and software, and we recommend the upgrade method strongly. Clean installations proved easy as well, but we needed to do more tweaking after the installations were completed. In no case did an installation actually fail -- something we weren't able to say when installing Win98 back in its early days.

We've organized this guide to help you work through your WinMe installation. We begin with a short look at whether Me is the OS you actually want and at compatibility issues surrounding the new OS. We then describe the three different versions Microsoft has made available, after which we explain the differences between conducting a clean installation and an upgrade installation. The Pre-Installation Checklist helps you prepare for the installation, essentially by letting you avoid all the problems we've encountered during years of OS installations, including this one.