Originally, I had planned to provide "Look At Me, Digital Photography" as the second installment in this series on new features in Windows Me, but a bizarre problem requiring the use of System Restore prompted me to look at the PC Health features in Windows Me first. I'll examine digital photography the next time around, but I'm relieved to say that I now have first-hand experience with Windows Me's reliability improvements, and they really do work.

Windows Me, as you may realize, is a minor upgrade to the Windows 9x product family; I've described it as "Windows 98 Third Edition" in the past, and that moniker isn't too far off the mark. But some of Windows Me's most compelling new features are under the hood, providing users with the reliability and stability enhancements that I think make this release worth having. Through the addition of features such as System File Protection (SFP), Help and Support Center, AutoUpdate, and System Restore, Microsoft has been able to give Windows Me a level of robustness that simply escapes Windows 95 and Windows 98. It's no Windows 2000, of course, but Windows Me does occupy an interesting middle ground between its Windows 9x predecessors and Windows 2000.

System File Protection
System File Protection (SFP) works in the background to ensure that new application installations cannot overwrite key system files (such as DLLs). Identical in concept to a feature in Windows 2000 called Windows File Protection (WFP), SFP answers a key defect in the architecture of the operating system: Poorly written applications are otherwise able to install older or incompatible versions of key system files, overwriting a newer version that is required by Windows or other applications. This has been the leading cause of instability in Windows, and the addition of SFP to Windows Me means that this OS will be more reliable and stable than its predecessors.

SFP is deceptively simple: The SFP Monitor maintains a database of system files that it will monitor, while providing copies of each of these files in a hidden location on the disk. When one of these files is overwritten or deleted, the Monitor restores the original version of the file, unless the new version is a more recent version. If the new version of the file is more recent, then SFP stores a copy of that version in its hidden cache. The process is silent and occurs without user intervention.

In Windows Me, almost 900 files are protected by SFP; you can find the list of protected files in the Windows Me Restore directory (C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\RESTORE\FILELIST.XML by default). Note that these files are considered core system files: SFP will not protect data files, third party files, and the like.

Overall, it's impossible not to like SFP: If you're using Windows Me (or Windows 2000), you've probably been spared some grief simply because this feature is included with the OS. You may never realize it's there, but thankfully it is.

Support Automation Framework: Help and Support Center
The HTML-based Help and Support Center takes advantage of a new set of technologies called Support Automation Framework (SAF), which provides users with online, automated support that can proactively prevent problems from happening, provide helpful information, and automate the resolution of problems. Help and Support collects support information from Microsoft and third parties such as hardware makers into a single, easy-to-use HTML-like application that I've discussed previously in my look at Activity Centers.

SAF and its Help and Support Center user interface provide users with a single location to obtain support for Windows Me. This providers users with the ability to launch a single application to obtain all their support needs, eliminating guesswork and browsing between help files. SAF also provides an automation feature that lets Help and Support interact with Microsoft and third party support sites, providing users with the most up-to-date support information automatically.

In real-world use, Help and Support Center is the first iteration of SAF and therefore somewhat limited. The user interface is markedly different from the rest of the Windows Me UI (it does share this look with System Restore, however, see below) though anyone familiar with Internet Explorer should feel at home quickly. But the first-generation feel of Help and Support is most obvious when you receive Windows Me with a new system: Currently, no third party help is available through this interface, though that will hopefully change over time. So the dream of one-stop support is still that, a dream.

On the other hand, Help and Support was designed to be easy to use, and it's sports a hierarchical help structure that does make sense. A Help "home page" shows upper-level help topics, as well as a list of recently viewed help topics for easy navigation. And you can drill down into help, or view the Index as you could in the past.

Overall, I'd have to give Help and Support a middling grade, with the caveat that this feature will just get better and better going forward.