• Toshiba 490XCDT laptop running a Pentium II 266, 160 MB of RAM, a 4.3 GB hard drive, a rather impressive docking station with four PC card slots total, USB external mouse, a 3Com 3C574-TX PC-card NIC, and an internal modem. This system is attached to external speakers while docked.
• Dell XPS-R400 mini-tower running a Pentium II 400, 384 MB of RAM, one 6.0 GB EIDE hard drive, two 5.1 GB EIDE hard drives, USB ZIP 100 drive, a 21" Dell-branded Trinitron monitor, Microsoft Sound System 10 speakers in USB mode, an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller with a 4/12 Plextor CDR, a NetGear FA310TX NIC, a 9X CD-ROM, and a Creative Labs AWE-64 sound card.
• Home-built mini-tower running a Celeron 400, 256 MB of RAM, two 4.3 GB UW SCSI-III Cheetah hard drives, an Adaptec 2940UW SCSI controller, an Adaptec 7850 SCSI controller, a Yamaha CDR, a 3Com Fast Etherlink XL NIC, a 12X CD-ROM, and Bose speakers on a Creative Labs AWE-64 sound card. This system also includes a parallel port ImageWave scanner. Both desktops are running PS/2 mice and keyboards.

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