Windows ME (or Me or Millennium Edition, depending who you ask) marks a turning point for Microsoft, although not in any technological sense; as you might expect, Windows ME is little more than warmed-over Windows 98 in terms of the essential operating system bits and pieces. Instead it's a turning point in terms of marketing - Windows ME is the first operating system exclusively targeted at the home market. Every other Microsoft operating system from DOS upwards has seen service on corporate desktops as well as in the home (in spite of what Microsoft might have intended). But now the Microsoft marketing machine says that corporate users should now purchase Windows 2000 whilst home users should purchase Windows ME.

There's no clear-cut technical reason why Windows ME can't be used in a work environment. It operates virtually identically to Windows 98 so needs negligible, if any, staff retraining. And it has the complete set of network clients and protocols needed for the office LAN or WAN (including Novel Netware, which was rumoured to have been removed and then reinstated after complaints from beta testers).

But Microsoft has concentrated on making Windows ME home user friendly. It's added features and additional programs whilst taking away other things. Many of these new features make it look decidedly out of place on a corporate desktop. For starters, everything is now geared around the idea of a single home user - Network Neighborhood is now renamed My Network Places, for example, and the My Documents folder has now been subdivided into My Photographs and My Music (the latter bizarrely containing a 30-second snippet of music by pop star Beck).

Realising that scanners and digital cameras are the most popular home peripherals for most PCs, Microsoft has tweaked the folder display to allow the viewing and simple manipulation of digital photographs. Control Panel now includes a Scanners and Digital Camera icon which lets you add and manage your image devices. As well as installing the device drivers for the camera or scanner, this also operates as a TWAIN management centre - something which has been due for a number of years.

In other places the changes are more subtle. My Network Places works on a shortcut basis - if you have a home network, for example, you can define a shortcut to another PC's My Documents folder. To access this folder you then simply double click the link. You can also define shortcuts to Internet locations such as the FTP server to which you upload your home pages.

My Network Places is where you encounter another of Windows ME's innovations - it's flagged as the first 'unbreakable' OS. You might expect My Network Places to incorporate Dial-Up Networking but instead it's now a sub-branch off the Start Menu (it's also missing from My Computer, where it used to live). The logic behind this is that if you can't get at Dial-Up Networking then you're less likely to damage your PC setup by accidentally removing your ISP's dial-up file.

The most startling demonstration of ME's new damage limitation approach is in the almost complete removal of DOS. ME doesn't (apparently) boot through DOS like Windows 95 and 98 did and you can't choose to boot into DOS mode. In fact, the only access you have to the command prompt is to click on Start/Accessories and then MS-Dos prompt. The reasoning behind this is that many technical support calls are caused by real-mode drivers messing-up Windows. So to stop this messing up you simply remove DOS. No DOS, no real mode drivers.

Of course, if you rely on any old DOS programs then you'll have to run them within a DOS box. This isn't a problem for most people except those who use Partition Magic or any ground-level diagnostic program (such as Norton Utilities' memory checker) which have to run without Windows present. If that is the case then you'll need to make a boot disk.

Elsewhere, the Control Panel is largely hidden, with only the icons that let you tweak without damage being available (you can opt to restore the old-fashioned Control Panel though). And while in Windows 98 the Windows folder was hidden from view, now the entire contents of C: are hidden.

Along with damage limitation features there are new diagnostic and fix-it tools. System Restore is perhaps most useful and is not entirely dissimilar to Powerquest's SecondChance or Adaptec's Go Back. It takes a snapshot of your system, complete with vital files, which can then be restored if anything should go wrong (or if you simply want to restore your PC to a previous state). Like most things in ME, and indeed in Microsoft's entire range of software products, it's entirely wizard driven.

The Help section of ME has now been entirely 'webbified' and offers new diagnostic tools, such as a network trouble-shooter that's able to test and report on your TCP/IP connection. Internet Explorer 5.5 is supplied as default, while the latest Media Player is also supplied, and can play virtually any multimedia file. Both these two are available as free downloads for Windows 95/98, too. There are a couple of interesting new tools too. Perhaps worried by the iMac's flaunted video editing capabilities, Windows ME includes Windows Movie Maker, a simple but effective wizard-driven video editing program.

But at the end of the day it's simply a case of another year and another Microsoft operating system that runs even more slowly than the last (Media Player takes a scandalous amount of time to load, even when you're playing something as simple as an MP3 file). The even blunter reality is that another Microsoft operating system means another set of bugs to be encountered and another upgrade fee to be paid.

Minimum spec is a 150MHz processor, 32MB RAM and 320MB of hard drive space, while the recommended spec is a 300MHz processor, 64MB RAM and a whopping 600MB of hard disk space.

Windows 98 will continue to be supported for a good number of years yet and we really can't see many reasons to upgrade. Windows 98 brought with it technological updates, such as USB support, but Windows ME brings with it few if any such things. If you must upgrade then you must, but we'd give it a few months for the major bugs to be discovered and fixes to be issued.