User interface Windows Me featured the
shell enhancements inherited from
Windows 2000 such as personalized menus, customizable Windows Explorer toolbars, auto-complete in Windows Explorer address bar and Run box, Windows 2000 advanced file type association features, displaying comments in shortcuts as tooltips, extensible columns in Details view (IColumnProvider interface), icon overlays, integrated search pane in Windows Explorer, sort by name function for menus,
Places bar in common dialogs for
Open and
Save, cascading
Start menu special folders, some Plus! 95 and Plus! 98 themes, and updated graphics. The notification area in Windows Me and later supported
16-bit high color icons. The Multimedia control panel was also updated from Windows 98.
Taskbar and Start Menu options allowed disabling of the drag and drop feature and could prevent moving or resizing the taskbar, which was easier for new users.
Hardware support improvements • Faster boot times: Windows Me features numerous improvements for improving
cold boot time, pre and post-logon boot times and time required for resuming from hibernation. Processing of real mode configuration files,
CONFIG.SYS and
AUTOEXEC.BAT, is bypassed at startup and essential real mode drivers like
HIMEM.SYS and
SMARTDRV.EXE are embedded into
IO.SYS. and installing
IntelliPoint allows reassigning the programmable buttons. •
Windows Image Acquisition: Windows Me introduced the Windows Image Acquisition
API for a standardized method of allowing Windows applications to transparently and more easily communicate with image acquisition devices, such as
digital cameras and
scanners. WIA intended to improve the configuration and the user interface for interacting with scanners and such devices, (which were previously supported by the
TWAIN standard) and simplify writing device drivers for developers. WIA also includes support for USB still image capture device classes such as scanners and cameras through the
Picture Transfer Protocol. • Improved power management and suspend/resume operations: The OEM version of Windows Me supports OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state (
hibernation) and other power management features without manufacturer-supplied drivers. • USB and FireWire support improvements: Windows Me is the only operating system in the Windows 9x series that includes generic drivers for
USB mass storage devices and USB printers. Support for FireWire
SBP-2 scanners and storage devices is also improved. • The ,
DirectSound, and
DirectShow APIs support non-
PCM formats such as
AC-3 or
WMA over
S/PDIF.
Media •
Windows Movie Maker: This utility is based on
DirectShow and
Windows Media technologies to provide Microsoft Windows computer systems with basic video capture and edit capabilities. It provides users with the ability to capture, edit, and re-encode media content into the
Windows Media format, a tightly compressed format that requires a minimal amount of storage space on the computer's hard disk when compared to many other media formats. •
Windows Media Player 7: The new version of the Windows multimedia player software introduces jukebox functionality featuring the Media Library, support for CD burning, an integrated media encoder, and the ability to transfer music directly to portable devices. Another new feature is its radio tuner that can be used to search for and connect to radio stations over the internet. Users can also customize the look and feel of the user interface through interactive skins. Windows Me can be upgraded to Windows Media Player 9 Series, which was later included in
Windows XP SP2. •
Windows DVD Player: The software
DVD player in Windows Me is a redesigned version of the one featured in Windows 98 that, unlike its predecessor, does not require a dedicated decoder card for DVD playback. Instead, it supports software decoding through a third-party decoder.
Networking technologies • Net Crawler: Windows Me introduced a net crawling feature that automatically searches out and creates shortcuts to network shares and printers in
My Network Places. This can be controlled using the
Automatically search for network folders and printers option. Shortcuts that are added by the net crawler but not detected again on the network in a reasonable time period are aged out and deleted. • New
TCP/IP Stack: Windows Me includes the
Windows 2000 networking stack and architecture. • The Home Networking Wizard is designed to help users to set up a computer that is running Windows Me for use on a small
home network. This includes setting up
Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) on a computer running Windows Me so the computer can share a connection to the Internet with other computers on the home network. •
Dial-up Networking component was updated in Windows Me and provides several enhancements while maintaining the desired features of prior releases of the operating system. The user interface had been reworked to provide all configurable parameters in one convenient location. The user interface now included three new tabs:
Networking,
Security and
Dialing. To improve dial-up networking, Windows Me includes built-in support for the Connection Manager dial-up client. Using the Connection Manager Administration Kit (an optional networking component in Windows 2000 Server), network administrators can pre-configure and deploy dial-up networking connections, by means of a Connection Manager service profile, to Windows Me–based client machines. •
Network Driver Interface Specification (NDIS) version 5.0 for Windows Me was enhanced to provide programming interface parity with NDIS version 5.0 in Windows 2000 (the programming interfaces used by network device drivers are the same for both platforms.) •
Universal Plug and Play: Windows Me introduced support for Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). Universal Plug and Play and NAT traversal APIs can also be installed on
Windows 98 and
Windows 98 SE by installing the Windows XP Network Setup Wizard.
System utilities •
System Restore: Windows Me introduced the "System Restore" logging and reversion system, which was meant to simplify troubleshooting and solve problems. It was intended to work as a rollback and recovery feature so that if the installation of an application or a driver adversely affected the system, the user could undo the installation and return the system to a previously working state. It does this by monitoring changes to Windows system files and the
registry. System Restore protects only the operating system files, not documents, and therefore is not a substitute for a backup program. •
System File Protection: First introduced with
Windows 2000 (as
Windows File Protection), and expanding on the capabilities introduced with
System File Checker in Windows 98,
System File Protection aimed to protect system files from modification and corruption silently and automatically. When the file protection is in effect, replacing or deleting a system file causes Windows Me to silently restore the original copy. The original is taken from a hard drive backup folder (%WinDir%\Options\Install) or from the Windows Me installation CD, if the cached copy of files on the hard disk has been deleted. If no installation CD is in the drive, a dialog box alerts the user about the problem and requests that the CD be inserted.
System File Protection is a different technology from
System Restore and should not be confused with the latter.
System Restore maintains a broad set of changed files including added applications and user configuration data stored repeatedly at specific points in time restored by the user, whereas
System File Protection protects operating system files with no user input. •
System Configuration Utility allows users to manually extract and restore individual system files from the Windows Me setup files. It has also been updated with three new tabs called "Static VxDs", "Environment" and "International". The
Static VxDs tab allows users to enable or disable static
virtual device drivers to be loaded at startup, the
Environment tab allows users to enable or disable
environment variables, and the
International tab allows users to set international language keyboard layout settings that were formerly set via the real mode MS-DOS configuration files. A
Cleanup button on the
Startup tab allows cleaning up invalid or deleted startup entries. •
System Monitor has been updated with a Dial-Up Adapter section. Users can now monitor items such as Connection Speeds, Bytes Received or Transmitted / Second. •
SCANDISK runs from within Windows upon an improper shutdown before the
Windows Shell loads. •
Automatic Updates: The Automatic Updates utility automatically downloads and installs critical updates from the
Windows Update Web site with little user interaction. It is set up to check Windows Update once every 24 hours by default. Users can choose to download which update they want, although high-priority updates must be downloaded and installed. • Compressed Folders: Windows Me includes native support for
ZIP files through the 'Compressed Folders' Explorer extension. This extension was originally introduced in the
Plus! 98 collection for Windows 98, but is included in the base operating system in Windows Me. • A new
Help and Support program has also been added, replacing the
HTML Help-based documentation in Windows 2000 and Windows 98. The Help and Support Center is entirely HTML-based and takes advantage of a technology called Support Automation Framework (SAF), that can show support information from the internet, allows collecting data for troubleshooting via WMI and scripting and for third parties to plug into Windows Help and Support. Several other support tools also shipped with Windows Me. • Windows Me also includes Internet Explorer 5.5, which supports a new Print Preview feature. It also shipped with the
MSN Messenger Service.
Accessibility features •
On-Screen Keyboard: Originally introduced with Windows 2000, On-Screen Keyboard makes it possible to input characters using the mouse instead of the keyboard. • The
Mouse Control Panel incorporates
IntelliPoint features, namely ClickLock (selecting or dragging without continuously holding down the mouse button), hiding the pointer while typing, and showing it by pressing
Ctrl. • The cursor (system caret) can be set to a thicker width. • Increased
Active Accessibility support in utilities such as
Calculator and
Magnifier. ==Removed features==