Windows ME CAB-Files

Microsoft seems to assume, that Windows ME will be only installed on systems with
plenty of disk-capacity, because without asking the user during installation, if copies all
setup-files from the CD-ROM to the harddisk (like introduced with the Windows98 SE Setup).

Check your system by selecting from the "Start"-menu: "Find" / "Files or Folders" and
search for *.cab:

(Unlike Windows98 SE, which installs its setup-files to Windows\options\cabs, Windows ME uses the
"Windows\options\install" directory)

When you have a closer look at the folder: Windows\options\install :

153 Mbytes of Setup-files
(compared to 121 MBytes of Windows 98 SE)
(some of you should remember the original Windows 95 released in Aug.95 ? If you got it on floppies:
15 (? ) floppies; on CD-ROM, it had 17 CAB-files, while Windows98-SE comes on 74 CAB-files, quite a growth ! )

If you are short in disk-capacity on your C-drive, you can move these 153 Mbytes to a different
disk-drive (or you can decide to install any required files from CD-ROM ,although it is much
more convenient to have the setup-files directly accessible on harddisk ).

If you move these setup-files, you need to update the Registry under the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup :

It contains under the key : "SourcePath" the location of the setup-files, change it to point to the
new disk-location or to "Win9x"-directory on the Windows-ME-CD-ROM.

There are less CAB files on WindowsME compared to Windows98SE, because each
CAB-size is now 8 MBytes (while a Windows98SE-CAB files of 1.7 MBytes could still be copied
to a compressed floppy-disk). You can view the content of CAB-files using the CAB-viewer
integrated in Windows Explorer.