This is what i got from another website
www.emulators.com Windows Millennium - the "no good reason to release it release". I honestly don't know why Microsoft bothered with this release. It's essentially Windows 98, minus an "Exit to DOS" feature. Most of the "new" features such as Internet Explorer 5.5, Media Player 7, etc. can easily be downloaded from Microsoft's web site. At a price of only $49.95 to $59.95, Microsoft must have realized that this was a useless Windows upgrade, as they priced it at almost half the price of Windows 95 and Windows 98 upgrades!
Now here is the major problem with Windows Millennium. In order to out SOMETHING on the box to say "hey, look, we added a new feature", Microsoft added this ridiculous "PC Health" feature to Millennium. Sounds sexy. Oooh, the operating system repairs itself. And when it screws up big time, you can "roll back" to an earlier installation. Sort of an "undo" feature in the OS, although, really, is this something you really want to advertise? Hey, our operating system is so unstable, we make it easy for you to go back to an earlier configuration!
Anyway, one of the things PC Health does as part of this System Restore feature is it constantly, and I mean CONSTANTLY, keeps backing up files. Since Windows Millennium was released a few weeks ago, we've received email after email after email from our customers saying that since upgrading to Millennium, their computers are running slower and their hard disk keeps thrasing.
The reason is very simple. Every file accessed, every documented opened, every file touched gets backed up to a hidden directory called C:_RESTORETEMP. This is fine if you are dealing with letters to grandma that are a few kilobytes in size, but what about large bitmaps? Large disk image files used by emulation software? Large downloads from the Internet? Yup, they get duplicated too.
In fact, we've easily been able to see that any computer we've upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows Millennium does in fact run slower and the hard disk is almost always on! I tried to disable the System Restore feature, by clicking on Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Restore, only to discover that System Restore can't be turned off there.
Worse, according to Microsoft's own documentation, (see
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/techart/winmesr.htm) the System Restore feature will keep backing up files until your hard disk fills up! The System Restore feature shuts itself off once your hard disk has less than 200 megabytes of disk space. However even this is not enough. In once instance, while running SoftMac 2000 with a 600 megabyte disk image file, the system managed to completely fill up the C: drive, causing Windows to no longer be able to grow the swap file. As a result, SoftMac ran out of memory, the Windows desktop ran out of memory and could not refresh the desktop properly, and the whole machine crashed and burned. We needed to reboot, at which point there were only a few megabytes of space left on what hours earlier had been a mostly empty 6 gigabyte hard disk! System Restore had copied gigabytes of useless duplicate files (including many copies of the 600 meg Macintosh disk image) to the hidden directory.
How to shut this off? Well, this was the kicker. You can't simply delete the backed up files because the entire _RESTORE directory is marked as in use and thus can't be deleted. And since Microsoft removed the "Exit to DOS" feature, one can't just exit Windows to a DOS prompt like before. While there is an obscure "Disable System Restore" option buried away in the System control panel applet, interestingly enough under the "Performance - File System - Troubleshooting" tab, that still doesn't help with all the wasted hard disk space.
So here is my brute force solution to shut off and remove all traces of System Restore:
In Control Panels, Add/Remove Programs, create a Windows boot disk. It's really an MS-DOS boot disk.
Shut down Windows and reboot the PC from the floppy disk.
Go the C: prompt by typing C:
Type "C:WINDOWSCOMMANDDELTREE C:_RESTORE" to remove all the System Restore files.
Create a bogus file called _RESTORE by, for example, running EDIT and creating a blank text file.
Type "C:WINDOWSCOMMANDATTRIB +r +s +h _RESTORE" to hide this file. This will prevent Windows from re-creating its hidden directory.
Now reboot the PC and watch Windows Millennium run much faster!
On a machine that lacks a floppy disk drive, such as a notebook computer, you're pretty much hosed. We have such a machine, which we upgraded from Windows 98 to Windows Millennium via the network (the notebook itself has no floppy and no CD-ROM drive). After upgrading, the machine was thrashing like mad. Well, without the ability to exit into DOS mode (a simple feat under Windows 95 and Windows 98) the only thing I could do was unscrew the internal 2.5" hard disk, pop it into another notebook computer that had a floppy, do the above steps, then pop the drive back into the original machine. It took about 15 minutes but worked.
The whole System Restore feature is just an idiotic idea. Instead of wasting disk space and CPU cycles backing up files, Microsoft should expend more effort in merging Windows 9x with Windows NT and gaining reliability by means of the NT kernel. If you want to back your files or your entire hard disk, there are many excellent and inexpensive utilities out there to do that. Microsoft should stay out of the file backup business, and should especially not add features that eat up all of the PC's disk space and CPU cycles!
My advice - if you have a slow PC, run Windows 95 OSR2 or Windows 98 Second Edition on it. If you have a faster PC with at least 16 megabytes of memory, run Windows 98 Second Edition. If you have 64 megabytes and run at 200 MHz or faster, don't even bother with a consumer version of Windows. Upgrade yourself to Windows NT 4.0 or Windows 2000 (a.k.a. NT 5.0) and enjoy all the benefits of a true 32-bit SMP-capable pre-emptive multi-tasking operating system. NT is to Windows 9x what Mac OS X will be to older versions of Mac OS - a solid, stable, powerful operating system. And unlike Mac OS X, it's been out since 1993!
