Any wisdom about reverting back to 98SE from ME?

[HollyBerri]

All right, I've finally had enough of ME. I had got it trimmed down and working OK, but now I've discovered that the large majority of my DOS games crash, or simply will not run, even with the DOS patch installed.

Naturally, that's the last straw. So I'm going back to 98SE. My plan is to boot into DOS, rename win.com and install from a bootable CD.

I've backed up the Registry and selected keys, but I don't mind reinstalling the progs I actually use (got some bloat that I can just as well delete). I've backed up my Favorites, Start Menu, Quick Launch, and Desktop folders--- I put very little in C:\Program Files, so that's OK to be overwritten. I have already uninstalled System Restore and PC Health, so I hope that will be no problem.

But I have a sneaking suspicion that ME is not going to like being "downgraded".

Has anyone done this? Any pitfalls I should know about? Anything I should back up that I didn't think of? Will Windows use the existing Registry if I'm installing an older version? If not, can I import reg keys from ME into 98 reliably?

Thanks!

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Holly

[xortam]

Why bother? Just wipe the disk clean and reinstall 98SE from scratch. Its easy enough to import your saved MSFT ap files (favorites, cookies (hah!), OE .dbx files, .wab, etc.) after the install.

[Gurm]

If you don't wipe and reinstall, this will be, as Sly Stallone once said "jour burdst ditebare!"

- Gurm

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Listen up, you primitive screwheads! See this? This is my BOOMSTICK! Etc. etc.

[HollyBerri]

'K, I'm hearing you.... I'm not loving the "wipe Drive C:" part, though... can I just delete the Windows folder, or must I really have totally empty drive?

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Holly

[xortam]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by HollyBerri:
... can I just delete the Windows folder, or must I really have totally empty drive?</font>

How much else do you need to save? You're going to have to reinstall your apps anyway. Windows puts its hooks in more than just the 'Windows' directory. If you know enough to pick it apart, have at it. Otherwise, I'd at least clean your boot volume.

[Kosh Naranek]

Clean your boot partition to avoid problems and to get rid of the setuplog, hardware detection log etc.

[Guru]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by HollyBerri:
'K, I'm hearing you.... I'm not loving the "wipe Drive C:" part, though... can I just delete the Windows folder, or must I really have totally empty drive?

</font>

Yes you can! But If you don't mind taking backups of your important files I would recomend deleting everyting on your c drive!

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Join the MURC SETI team! | SETI @ MURC

According to the latest official figures, 43% of all statistics are totally worthless..

[rylan]

Well, first of all.. -Shame on you for installing WinME-
Ok.. thats better

Anyway, you can delete the windows directory, however, any apps or programs or any other stuff that you installed on ME won't work, since the registry is gone and system files are gone.. you'd have to reinstall everything anyway, so you might as well just format the drive and start fresh.

[EvilDonnyboy]

ME didn't suk that much, when I had it. If I didn't go to win2k, I'd still be using it. It ran as well as win98se on my rig. DOS proggies and everything. There was a small bit of extra (albeit un-noticable) system overhead but that was it. Sure I never used the System Restore or any of the extra features. But it had faster boot-up times and a faster defrag proggy. Those 2 things outweighed the extra un-noticable system overhead.

Of course now that I got win2k, it takes forever to boot up. But that problem is averted by having to never reboot. But it's included defrag proggy suks like crap. It's about as fast as win98's defrag proggy. sux.

[paulcs]

Formatting the C drive of your day-to-day system can be an time consuming, labor-intensive process, but I think your system will be noticably peppier afterwards.

I do a lot of complete reinstalls on test systems. A little bit of planning ahead can make the reinstall process a lot less painful. Copy your drivers and whatever software you can on another drive. Write down your settings. (I use text files.) Backup your email and bookmarks/favorites, of course. I forgot once, and it wasn't a happy experience.

Paul
paulcs@speakeasy.net

[paulcs]

Geeeez! I sound like hardware's answer to Martha Stewart.

Paul
paulcs@speakeasy.net

[xortam]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by paulcs:
Geeeez! I sound like hardware's answer to Martha Stewart.</font>

Gee, rereading it, you really did.

I just went through my first Win98 reinstall in two years. I used to do numerous installs when I was working but those test systems never had anything to be restored unless I was testing disaster recovery functionality. I appreciated the IE favorites import/export function but the E-Mail backup/restore can easily be done manually (except accounts info). Question though, do you (or anybody) know how to backup/restore news group messages (short of a third-party utility)? Redownloading numerous large NG posts is painful.

[Rags]

Or Bob Vila

Rags

[Bohrn]

nah, Bob would just go to the Micron factory and watch while one of thier guys did all the work. And then he would push the tech out of the way and hit the enter key for the final step, saying "...and if you follow all the correct procedures, it really is that easy"

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AsusP3B-F,P3 880 Slot1, 512megsPC133,G40032megSH, Diamond MX300,13.5gigs of HD's,52X CDrom,WinME, PD 6.21 ,Altec Lansing ATP3Subwoofer,
Envision 17",Terrayon Cable modem,Linksys EtherFast LNE100TX nic,1 grey cat,1 black cat & 1 calico

[Rags]

So true