August 04, 2000 | Microsoft's decision to slash the price of the Windows Millennium Edition upgrade from $89 to $59 --- a whopping 33 percent savings -- made headlines this week. But the public should beware of geeks bearing gifts. Windows Me has some significant improvements, but for most users those improvements do not justify the pain and potential dangers they will face with this upgrade. Microsoft can lower the price of Windows Me and give it a few great features, but it can't fundamentally make Me a better operating system than Windows 95, because of underlying technical flaws with the whole Windows operating environment.

I know, because I spent more than a week struggling with a Windows Me upgrade before I gave up, reformatted my hard drive, installed a clean version of the operating system on my 550 MHz Pentium III desktop computer and reinstalled all of my applications. Now that my computer is finally operational once again, I'm quite pleased with the results. But I doubt that other computer users will think that the new features are worth the hassle.

Microsoft's Windows Millennium Edition won't be in stores until September, but the code for the operating system has been finalized for many weeks now. A few weeks ago a publicist at Microsoft's public relations firm called me up and offered to send me a complementary review copy of system. "Sure," I said, "send me a copy. I love living dangerously."

The publicist laughed a little and reassured me that she was sending me "final code." A few days later the promised CD-ROM showed up in the mail, and I bravely inserted it into my machine.

Windows Me is the latest in a long series of Microsoft operating systems that are directly descended from the PC-DOS operating system that powered the original 1981 IBM Personal Computer.

Looking back from our vantage point in the 21st century, people remember DOS as a slow, clunky operating system. But I remember DOS as an exceedingly reliable operating platform. In part, this is because of its simplicity. DOS had two main functions: controlling the placement of files on a computer's disk drive and loading application programs into memory for execution. I had one of those early IBM computers and my memory is that the only time it crashed was when I wrote my own programs. If I was running BASIC or my simple word processor, that original PC was far more reliable than the Windows-based computers that I use today. It was also reasonably fast.

DOS was so reliable and fast, in fact, that Microsoft was ridiculed when it started shipping the graphical user interface now known as Windows. Back then Windows wasn't so much an operating system as a programming framework that Microsoft built into its word processing and spreadsheet applications. Windows was slow; it made computers crash. When computer makers started shipping Windows 3.0 pre-installed on desktops and notebooks, many people uninstalled the software and kept running DOS.

Since then, Microsoft has released a series of Windows upgrades -- Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95, Windows 95B, Windows 98, Windows 98 Second Edition -- and the computer-using public has eagerly adopted each of these in turn, all with the hope that their computers would become easier to use and less prone to crashing. According to PC Data, Microsoft has sold more than 4 million copies of Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE from retail shelves, producing $350 million in revenue. That's not bad when you consider that people who bought computers running Windows 95 technically didn't need to upgrade to Windows 98 -- you can download most of the improved functionality over the Web from the Microsoft site.