Company Info: American Megatrends Inc. (AMI) is probably best known for their AMI BIOS, but also provides RAID controllers, motherboards, system management utilities and more to over 55 percent of today’s high-tech manufacturers.

Installation

Installation was pretty simple with the option to install the DOS or Windows versions of the software. The Windows version was a NO brainer. If you read the Quick Start Guide or readme.txt on the CD, you should have no problem with the DOS version. There are four methods of installation that you can choose from.

1) Install AMIDiag to a hard disk

2) Install AMIDiag to a hard disk and create a bootable floppy to run directly from this installation. (This is the most direct way to run AMIDiag on a Windows ME system.)

3) Create a bootable floppy to run AMIDiag directly from the CDROM. (The floppy is created with your CDROM drivers installed.)

4) Create two AMIDiag floppy diskettes. (This is useful you cannot access your drives or need quick access to the program on another machine.) 

NOTE: Windows NT and Windows 2000 will not make bootable floppies. This is because neither of the two operating systems have the underlying DOS layer that is present in Windows 95/98/ME.

Only a few minor hitches with installation...When I clicked on the "Install AMIDiag for Windows" option and...nothing. All of the other buttons worked fine. I just ran setup from within the Win folder on the CD. I was in the process of  organizing and backing up my data for the big reformat I had been putting off. I keep a lean and mean machine, but after so many hard drive upgrades using Drive Copy, the bloated OS just wasn't the same. So I put the blame on my machine, especially when I then installed the program on my laptop, it worked just fine. That's it...I'm doing the big F's to my hard drive. It's time to try the install again. This time when I clicked on the "Install AMIDiag for Windows" option, it came back with an error message stating there was not enough room on drive C: to install! Once again I ran setup from the Win folder with no problem. Possible bug in the menu setup? 

During installation, I was given the option to select where the program shortcut would be placed in the Start Menu. I like this, since I have my own organizational setup rather than having the typical bloated and unproductive Start Menu. I chose my Utilities folder, and yet it ignored my reply and added it's own folder. Yes, these are just little things that I can deal with, however, I would have thought any beta testing would have eliminated these minor glitches. I'm sure a future update will.

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The Package