I've seen some systems run great with ME, but only after the drivers got updated. I think I had an issue with the CDRW drive I had with ME, it didn't work with the built in driver and it clobbered EZ-CD 4.X (Needed the 5.0 upgrade, which cost money) and with the Nero driver it ran faster than the built in driver. But after a while it was RRR to 98SE.