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WinMe Tips #1 Feb.27, 2001

This is an amended version based on two readers comments. Thanks for the input people.

For all You WinMe users; here are a few tips I've collected from various sources over the past few months.

Clean Install of WindowsME

You can install WindowsME without having a previous operating system installed. This is usually called a clean install and can be done onto a new partition or a new drive. 

  1. You need to have a previous version of your Windows CD (Win 95/98)available.
  2. I recommend copying the source files to the hard drive and installing from there. To do this use your File Manager(Win95) or Windows Explorer (Win98) and find the Win9x folder on your WinMe CD; copy it over to your hard drive to a folder you can call WinMeInstall. Chances are that when you put the Win Me CD into your CD ROM Drive, a window will appear asking you if you want to install - say no, and close the WinMe Intro window while you are at it.
  3. Close all your non Windows applications that are running in the background. Now use File manager or Windows Explorer to view the Win9x folder you have just copied over to your hard drive , find the setup.exe file and double click on it. When you are prompted for a previous operating system, simply insert your 
    Windows95/98 CD and browse to the directory where the source files are located.
  4. You can then continue installing on a clean system without having to install a previous version.

Unnecessary Startups or Components

Remember that by default, Win ME set's several services and features to run automatically such as items in Task Scheduler, Automatic Update and Msconfig. Many of these items can be disabled so as to increase your startup resources & retain manual control of your system.

Items auto-started can be pared down drastically via "System Configuration Utility's [msconfig] . So fire up your System Config Utility, you can do this by clicking on Run and then typing in msconfig.exe or finding the shortcut for it in your Start Menu. Select the Advanced Button and tick off enable Win ME's Startup Menu. Now click on the Selective Startup tab and untick any items you don't want to run at startup. Easy does it folks; if you don't know what it is - don't select it. But just Scan Registry is sufficient in some cases.

In addition, you can go to Control Panel, click on open Add/Remove Programs and then select the Windows Setup tab. You can then remove Windows components that are not needed - once again folks; easy does it - if you don't know what it is - don't remove it.

Deleting Unnecessary Files

You can save nearly 150 megs of hard drive space by deleting the file in the \WINDOWS \ OPTIONS \ INSTALL directory.
These are the source files for ME that you should already have on CD.

And today's last tip is:

Running ScanReg

With WindowsME, you can open a DOS window to run scanreg, at the blinking cusor type scanreg /restore, or scanreg /opt
You will be prompted to do a reboot - answer Yes(Y) as your computer must restart to finish
Before this was only available when booting straight to DOS.