I chose these systems
because they represent fairly typical mainstream hardware and, perhaps most
importantly, they each have a variety of multimedia and USB devices that
should take Millennium through its paces. I'll describe Millennium's
ability to recognize and correctly utilize these devices in the next
section.
I also upgraded a stock Windows 98 SE install to Windows
Millennium Beta 2, since this will be the most common upgrade path
for most users. This was performed on the Dell XPS-R400 system, and
I subsequently installed my entire range of typically-used
applications on the system to check it out thoroughly.
Setting up Windows Millennium
The Millennium setup program (Figure
2) is very similar to that employed by
Windows 98 and Windows 98 Second Edition (SE) and will therefore be
very familiar to the hundreds of millions of people already using
these operating systems. A few of the dialogs in the setup wizard
have been cleaned up (Figure 3) but
most of the screens should be familiar to anyone who has installed Windows
98/SE (Figure 4 and Figure
5). However, there are a few new choices, such as the Compressed
Folders feature from Plus! for Windows 98 (these choices
are not available during an upgrade, however, which kind of stinks.
And there's no way to install them later either, at least in Beta 2). One nice touch
during Setup is a new dialog (Figure
6) that was added to the System Configuration stage of setup,
which occurs as the last step after the second reboot: It displays
progress bars indicating how far along the current component and the
overall progress are. This takes the guessing out of what used to be
the most monotonous stage of setup.
Windows Millennium, unlike Windows 2000, requires three reboots before you are presented with a running operating system and
this, I think, is a weakness of this legacy operating system which
cannot detect Plug and Play (PnP) and non-PnP hardware at the same
time. The setup
routine just takes too much time.
I set up Millennium in two ways: First, as an
upgrade to Windows 98 Second Edition, and then, after a complete
hard drive reformat, as a fresh install. In the case of the upgrade
(which was performed on the 400 MHz desktop machine), Windows 98 SE had a "clean" Device
Manager with no yellow bangs, meaning that every hardware device
attached to the system was detected, configured, and working
properly (Figure 7). In this
limited upgrade test, Millennium upgraded without a hitch.
In the case of the clean installs, Millennium fared just a bit
worse: On the home-built desktop machine, every hardware device was
detected and configured properly. On the Dell desktop and the
laptop, the NICs had to be manually configured using drivers from
the manufacturers, which isn't generally too much to ask though, in
the case of the desktop, it was a nightmare: In fact, I was pretty
sure I wasn't going to be able to get the network card installed
when it suddenly just worked for some reason. On the laptop,
the clean install resulted in one device (it turned out to be the
Toshiba internal modem), listed under "Other devices" that
wasn't found (Figure 8). Even given
these small caveats, Millennium is a hardware compatibility champ,
which is pretty much what I expected given its Windows 9x heritage.
A first look at Windows Millennium
When Windows Millennium first boots up, its appearance is a
striking cross between Windows 98 and Windows 2000. The Windows 98
color scheme is used (teal desktop with dark gray window coloring)
but the desktop icons are straight from Windows 2000 (Figure
9), as are the
user interface gadgets in My Computer. In fact, a curious blend of
Windows 98 and Windows 2000 pervades throughout the entire OS,
making it sometimes difficult to tell which OS you're actually
using. If I could make one recommendation to the Consumer Windows
team, it would be to make sure that the Millennium user interface is
as close to identical to Windows 2000 as is possible: This will at
least give Millennium the appearance of quality.
Let's take a closer look at this. In the My Computer window alone,
we can see a variety of cross-breeding between Microsoft's current
two OSes (Figure 10). For example, the toolbar is identical to that in Windows
2000, even down to the Customize dialog that you can access by
right-clicking the toolbar (Figure 11). The Web view in Millennium is unique,
however, different from (and far uglier than) that in both Windows 98 and Windows
2000.
The My Computer window itself mimics the Teutonic efficiency of Windows 2000,
where all special folders except the Control Panel have
been removed. Nice.
The Tools menu in My Computer offers exactly the same choices as its
Windows 2000 counterpart, though some of the choices work
differently (Figure 12). The Map Network Drive and Disconnect Network
Drive choices are identical to those in Windows 98, and do not
offer the nice Wizard-based approach used in Windows 2000 (Figure
13). The
Folder Options choice is straight out of Windows 2000, however,
giving Millennium users access to a much wider array of choices than
those presented in Windows 98 (Figure
14). But the Synchronize option is perhaps
the most disappointing: In Windows 2000, this option allows you to
synchronize Offline Folders, Offline Web pages, and Web Folders. But
Millennium lacks an Offline Folders option because of its consumer
bent, which is a shame (Figure 15).
Confused? These types of subtle differences are all over the
place and you can see that the Consumer Windows team is working
toward getting Millennium as close to Windows 2000 as possible. The
Millennium System Properties dialog is identical to Windows 98, not
Windows 2000 (Figure 16). The My Network Places folder looks identical to
that in Windows 2000, but works differently: For every shared
resource on the network, a Network Place shortcut is
automatically created for you, up to ten resources on ten machines
(Figure 17). This quickly leads to a slew of icons in the folder, something
that doesn't happen in Windows 2000. Another little disappointment:
The Network Properties dialog is straight out of Windows 98,
offering Fisher Price-like access to your network cards, protocols,
and other networking properties, not the elegant interface used by
Windows 2000 (Figure 18). And God forbid you change anything in
networking: You'll be rebooting all day. Let's hope the Consumer
Windows team can get the Windows 2000 networking code going in
Millennium.
The Control Panel (Figure 19) benefits from some of Windows 2000's
consolidations (Scanners and Cameras, for example) but not others (Millennium still uses separate applets
for Modems and Telephony, for example, while Windows
2000 uses a consolidated Phone and Modem options applet to
perform the same tasks). Microsoft has also provided beta testers
with a brand new version of TweakUI, which is nice (Figure
20).
The Millennium Start Menu is laid out like that in Windows 98, but
it does employ the Personalization feature from Windows 2000, which
is nice. But
Millennium actually surpasses Windows 2000 with its Taskbar and
Start Menu options: In addition to the options we expect in Windows
2000 (expand Control Panel and Printers, for example), Millennium
offers the following unique choices: Display Favorites (unless
this is turned off with TweakUI), Display the
Run command, Enable me to drag and drop items in the Start
menu,
Enable me to move and resize the Taskbar, and Enable shortcut menus
on the taskbar (Figure 21).
I could go on and on about the user interface weirdisms (I guess I
already have), but I think you get the idea. Of course, the user
interface will probably change a bit over the course of the beta. I
expect Windows Millennium to even more closely resemble Windows
2000 by the time it ships next year.
New HTML applications: A preview of Activity Centers?
Online help in Windows Millennium has been replaced by a new utility called
Help and Support (Figure 22, previously known as Help Center when
Activity Centers were a go and
PC
Health before that; it's also found in a folder called PCHEALTH,
interestingly). This is an HTML-based utility that is designed to reduce
support calls by giving the user and easy way to troubleshoot
problems with the system. It could eventually be a great idea, but
the current version looks
sick when compared to the old online help though the opening
"page" is nice enough. Once you drill down enough,
however, you see the weird integration of Windows help files into
the HTML user interface (Figure 23) and even some dead-ends.
Granted, it's still in beta and I must admit that it's improved
ten-fold since the first Developer's Preview last summer. I'll be
writing a lot more about Help and Support in a Millennium
Technology Showcase before the end of the year. Stay tuned.
There's also a new System Restore tool (Figure
24, located
under System Tools in the Start menu) that can be used to undo changes made to your programs and Windows. You will be
able to use this tool to go back to a previous state that was known
to work properly, similar to the last known good configuration
feature in Windows 2000. System Restore allows you to change your
system configuration in three ways: By event (installing a new
program, for example), by system checkpoint (Figure
25, checkpoints
are snapshots that are taken several times a day; the system saves
two weeks' worth of them), or by date (Figure
26). Changes made with
System Restore can also be reversed, a nice feature. Also, anything
saved in the virtual folder My Documents will not be
affected, so you don't need to worry about Microsoft stomping all
over your data files.
Both Help and Support and System Restore are examples
of what would have been Activity Centers, had that feature been
retained for this release of Consumer Windows. But both of these
tools, especially System Restore, have somewhat nasty user
interfaces, which are slow and awkward because they're based on
HTML, not the rich and mature Win32 API normally used by native
Windows applications. These tools will likely improve over time and,
of course, when Activity Centers are finally implemented in Neptune,
the technology will likely have matured dramatically. In the
meantime, I'll reserve judgment on them for the final release.
Whither DOS?
One of the big rumors circulating about Millennium is that it
has somehow done away with MS-DOS, which has been used as boot
loader and run-time environment in Windows since Windows 95. Well,
DOS is alive and well in Millennium, actually, but Microsoft has
done a good job of hiding it. This was done to simplify the
operating system, however, not in some bid to fool anyone about its
underpinnings. (Shades of Andrew Schulman and "No, really,
Windows 95 is a fully 32-bit operating system!")
So here's the story: Windows Millennium contains MS-DOS, as did
Windows 95 and 98/SE (Figure 27). And like those operating systems, you can
launch and run MS-DOS applications in full-screen mode or in a
window and they run as good as ever. What's happened in Millennium,
however, is that Microsoft has stripped out the options to shutdown
to an MS-DOS command line or boot into a command line when the
system first starts up. One could debate the rationale behind this,
but I basically agree with the decision: The age of DOS is long gone, and almost
nobody would ever need to boot into DOS anymore. And those that do
can still use a boot floppy, of course.
I tested DOS support by running DOOM 2 and Duke Nukem 3D. Both ran
flawlessly on each system, in both full screen and windowed mode.
In short, only Real mode DOS support has been
removed: Windows Millennium will not process AUTOEXEC.BAT or
CONFIG.SYS files when it boots (though it will populate these files
as needed so that applications that rely on them will still work, an
interesting touch). Environment variables that were
previously set up in AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS can be set up in
the Windows Registry, though no Windows 2000-like user interface for
this currently exists. I expect the UI for this to come along
before Millennium ships, but we'll see. If you have a DOS program that needs to run
in Real mode, you can always edit its PIF file to prevent the program from
detecting that it is running under Windows.
About Driver Signing and the future of Devices
Perhaps the single most controversial move in Millennium is the
inclusion of driver signing, which blocks some non-certified
drivers from installing. Microsoft did this with an eye toward
reducing the single biggest cause of instability in Windows,
poorly-written device drivers. In earlier Millennium builds, the
driver signing feature actually blocked the installation of certain
drivers, but I haven't seen that yet in Beta 2 and I've installed
all kinds of crazy stuff. It looks like
they've reduced the security to a set of sternly worded dialogs,
which is a much better approach. Remember, consumers are going to
expect devices to simply work on Millennium as they did on earlier
versions of Windows 98. Microsoft has opened
its Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) to OEMs,
however: Hopefully, they will take advantage of this opportunity to
get drivers certified by Microsoft and, better yet, included in the
Millennium box.
New Power Management features
Millennium supports the ACPI and APM 1.2 power management
specifications (Figure 28). New to Millennium is Hibernation, a Windows
2000 feature that saves the current state of the system to a file
when you shut down the system, and then allows you to power off the
system like you would when you normally shut down. When you decide
to turn your computer back on, Windows will then restore your system
to the state you previously left it in. However, Millennium Beta 2
was missing Hibernation support: Apparently, Microsoft discovered a
problem with it and the feature will be returned in future
builds.
From my experience with Windows 2000, I'm not sure what I think about Hibernation: Like a World War II
veteran that doesn't trust ATM machines, I'm a bit suspicious of
this feature and its ability to save state. But more rationally, I'm
also not too fond of the amount of time it takes a
Hibernation-enabled machine to come back to life, at least in
Windows 2000. For now I'll stick with Standby mode, which seems to
work much more quickly in Millennium than it does in Windows 2000.
New gaming features
When Microsoft contacted me about the Millennium Beta 2 release, the
press kit contained an interesting mention of a feature I hadn't
heard of before, the Application Manager and Game Options
applet. This tool, I was told, is designed to aid users in the
installation and management of games. When games that support the
Application Manager are installed, their disk space usage can be
managed automatically, so that frequently used games get the space
they need while infrequently used titles can be setup to use a
CD-ROM disk instead. That sounds reasonable enough, and one of the
first things I did when I received Millennium was to go and look for
it. There's no icon for such a tool in the Start menu however, so I
checked the Control Panel and saw nothing obvious. And because there
was nowhere else to go, I finally took a look at the Gaming
Options applet in the Control Panel (called Game controllers
on a Windows 98 SE system). And there is it, almost completely
hidden.
In Windows 98, the Game Controllers has two tabs, General and
Advanced. The Millennium Gaming Options applet has three, Controllers
(Figure 29, same as "General"), Controller IDs
(Figure 30, same as "Advanced") and a new one, Disk
Usage (Figure 31). The Disk Usage pane of the Gaming Options
applet is, as far as I can tell, the only UI for this
much-ballyhooed Application Manager and Game Options tool, at least
in Beta 2. And as far as I can tell, there isn't much going on here.
I installed two games, Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament,
on the Dell system but since both predate this tool (despite being
brand new at the time of this writing), Millennium has no way to
monitor their disk usage. So basically, a game would need to be
written with this feature in mind for it to work at all.
I'm hoping that there's more going on here than what I can see in
Beta 2. Time will tell.
Internet Explorer 5.5
Windows Millennium includes yet another version of Internet
Explorer, this time version 5.5 (Figure
32). IE 5.5 doesn't offer
much over IE 5.0 or 5.01, though it does, of course, include a
number of bug fixes and a cool new Print Preview feature (Figure 33)
that currently has some display issues (Figure
34). I'll be
reviewing IE 5.5 separately soon, but there's nothing major to
report.
Application and hardware compatibility
On my final install of Millennium Beta 2, an upgrade of Windows 98
SE that went flawlessly, I installed a large number of applications
that I use on a regular basis, such as Office 2000, Copernic 2000
pro, Visual Studio 6.0, Netscape Communicator, and many more,
including the two games I mentioned previously. Everything worked
flawlessly.
I also installed a number of hardware items, including a parallel
port scanner (Storm), a RIO 500 MP3 player, a Microsoft FreeStyle
Pro game pad, the Microsoft IntelliMouse Explorer mouse, an Iomega
ZIP 100 USB, and the Microsoft Internet keyboard Pro, all of which
are USB devices. Everything worked perfectly. In fact, Windows
Millennium seems to copy the behavior of Windows 2000 where many
hardware device drivers are loaded on the system disk so that the
CD-ROM isn't required every time a new piece of hardware is
connected. In a age where 13 GB 7200 RPM drives can be had for less
than $150, this is not a problem and I'm frankly pretty happy with
the feature. However, I also think that this should be an option
during install for the hard drive challenged.
The only real hardware compatibility issue I had was with the
NetGear FA310TX NIC
in the Dell.
When I installed Millennium fresh, it refused to recognize the card,
despite the fact that it's not a particularly new NIC. And my
attempts to get the system to recognize the proper drivers were
infuriating: After numerous reboots and retries, it finally took,
though I still have no idea why. The upgrade from Windows 98 SE went
far more smoothly: I installed the drivers under 98 without issue
(other than the numerous reboots: One for the driver, one for
changing to a static IP, one for installing MS Proxy client, and one
for installing the MS file sharing service) and then upgraded.
Windows Millennium accepted the drivers and proceeded like a champ.
In short, software and hardware compatibility were exactly what I
expected: Nearly perfect. And frankly, I'd accept nothing less in a
consumer Windows that is clearly a point upgrade of Windows
98.
Conclusion
Windows Millennium, like Windows 98 Second Edition, is
clearly designed for the vast majority of home/consumer users.
Unless you're a programmer, work-at-home system administrator, or
other power user who
simply must have Windows 2000 Professional, Windows Millennium is
the way to go. It offers the best hardware and software
compatibility in a package that easily out-performs Windows 2000 on
identical hardware. Boot time is measured in seconds, not minutes.
And because the out-of-box experience is so similar to Windows 2000,
Millennium users will be able to get the best of both worlds.
But Millennium is also a pretty boring upgrade. Like Windows 98 and
Windows 98 SE before it, Millennium offers a new Web browser (5.5 in
this case), bug fixes, and a few new features. But nothing here is
all that exciting and it certainly doesn't warrant a $90 upgrade
price. Hopefully, Microsoft will take a page from its SE playbook
and offer this release for $20 to existing Windows 98/SE customers.
I've heard rumors, too, that Millennium will not be sold at retail
but will be only made available with new computer purchases, ala
Windows 95 OSR2. This wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. While
it's likely that Millennium will ultimately be named Windows 98
Millennium Edition, the company may as well call it Windows
98 Third Edition (or Windows 95 Sixth Edition for the
cynical). Without any serious eye candy, it's going to be a tough
sell for many people.
Of course, Millennium is still pretty early in its development cycle
and its likely that many things will change before its
released. Hopefully, the changes will be geared toward reducing the
usability differences between it and Windows 2000 Professional,
though I'm thinking that Microsoft is going to come under some
criticism for releasing yet another version of Windows 98 without
any major UI changes. I'm looking forward to the full-fledged Activity Centers, though we won't see that until the
Windows 2000-based Neptune, due in 2001.
The best thing about Millennium, of course, is that it just works.
Even in this early beta form, it looks like a winner for consumers.
I'll need to spend more time with Beta 2 in the coming weeks to be
sure, but I'm looking forward to
the final release, now expected in mid to late 2000.
Windows Millennium requires a Pentium 200 or higher and 32 MB of RAM
or higher. I recommend a Pentium II processor with at least 64 MB of
RAM, preferably 128 MB or more.
Screenshots
Figure 1: "Millennium" Beta
2 composite.
Figure 2: Windows Millennium Setup is almost identical to Windows 98
SE...
Figure 4: ...with dialogs with choices that are easier to
understand...
Figure 6: The nicest touch in Setup: A component progress dialog.
Figure 8: On two systems, the network card wasn't properly detected
and installed.
Figure 9: The Millennium desktop.
Figure 10: My Computer: The good, the bad, and the ugly.
Figure 11: Customizing My Computer toolbars is a snap.
Figure 13: No nice Wizard for you! 
Figure 14: Finally, the global Folder Settings from Windows 2000.
Figure 16: System Properties.
Figure 17: My Network Places includes an unusual auto-add resource
feature that I detest.
Figure 18: Networking, for ages 3 and up. May include small parts
that are hazardous to young children.
Figure 20: A cool new version of TweakUI that probably won't make
the final CD.
Figure 21: The Taskbar and Start Menu properties exceeds that of
Windows 2000, nice.
Figure 22: Look, an Activity Center! Oh, wait.
Figure 23: Uh, yeah, that looks fine. Go with it.
Figure 24: System Resources features a friendly puke-green UI.
Figure 27: DOS lives in Millennium!
Figure 31: Seriously, this is an exciting new feature.
Figure 32: Internet Explorer 5.5.
Figure 33: IE 5.5 supports a powerful new Print Preview feature.
