WinME: Misunderstood or just plain bad?

Bry89

As someone has made a thread about Vista, I have some things to say about its other OS that many people love to hate. Was Windows ME really this bad as what people say it is, or is it not? The whole thing divides opinion but to me, it's alright. However, I can say that Microsoft should've done better than making it a quick rehash of Windows 98 and releasing it only months after 2000 was out. I would've liked to see it if they hadn't pulled the plug on Neptune and use parts of it to later create XP. I suppose people have had different views on this... some may have been cursed with so many BSODs and other stuff, whereas others have never faced a single blip at all. Might be to do with individual hardware configurations, I don't know.

Discuss anyway, folks.

BlueSun

I tried ME once several years ago. I never got any BSODs and it was fairly stable. But then again, I was running it in a VM.

My opinion of ME was that it was pretty much just as bad as the rest of the 9x line. They tried to put lipstick on a pig and call it a fashion model.

They added a couple of new features that were nice, built in support for .zip compressed files for example. Pretty much most of those features made it in to XP.

At the end of the day it was just a newer version of 98.

Bry89

Windows 98 wasn't all that bad, even the Second Edition which was fun to me (but not on a crappy computer that I had many years ago containing it. That was slower than a tortoise with a sore leg). But yes, it is more or less an updated Win98.

For it being a lot more stable on VMs rather than on a real machine... I wonder why that is?

Plokite_Wolf

The idea of developing Windows Me (as it ended up to be, at least) was a stupid one from the start. It brought zero relevant additions over 98, on which people had just gotten used to, so there was absolutely no reason to migrate to it.

The excuse of developing it to "answer Apple's new OS" is also moot. Even back then, Mac was irrelevant. Windows 9x already met consumers' needs at the time, so it was a total waste of invested money and effort.

SomeGuy

Plokite_Wolf wrote:

The idea of developing Windows Me (as it ended up to be, at least) was a stupid one from the start. It brought zero relevant additions over 98

There were some driver related changes in progress, which was part of the problem. Vendors were SUPPOSED to update their drivers for Windows ME. But because MS made it clear it was EOL and because Windows 98 drivers still "worked" no one bothered to update or retest their existing drivers for Windows ME.

The result was that Windows ME, by itself, was fairly stable. But when users or vendors started installing Windows 98 drivers, they would encounter various instabilities.

There was also the issue that Windows ME crippled the ability to exit to DOS. Make no mistake, Windows ME was exactly the same architecture as Windows 95/98 and still ran on top of DOS. They just changed a few lines of code to prevent users from exiting to DOS. The thing was, there were a LOT of DOS games and utilities that requires Windows 95/98 users to exit to DOS, and Windows ME - even though technically capable of it - would just sit there giving them the finger.

DallasCHVN

Windows ME had cool features, but was so bad it would Crash too easily. My experience, It's not Windows Millennium Edition, it's Windows Hell Edition. It crashed while playing music and when I pushed the power button, seriously! It was so crappy. Vista's good, not ME

KCompRoom2000

I think the issue was Microsoft releasing Operating Systems too constantly in 1998-2001, 2 of them (98SE, and Millennium) were just minor updates to 98. Windows Millennium was pretty stable to me when I ran it on my 2 old Dell laptops, As long as your hardware had WDM drivers and not just VXD Drivers, It can be a good OS on real hardware.

birdy

DallasCHVN wrote:

Windows ME had cool features,

True, Windows ME introduced System Restore. Where windows can restore from an earlier point in time. Since having a Windows ME machine, have to say just the whole thing sucks. For me Bad or corrupt Dll files can lead to a BSOD. Even working with MS word can bring up a DLL file causing an error. But that's just me, and that it's running on an Intel Celeron....

Methusalix

I wonder why nobody mentioned the great USB support in comparison to 98. I found this feature most intriguing by the time.

TCPMeta

My best friends mother had a PC that was showing some age she had a co-worker install ME on her system. It was highly unstable and made the system run slow as hell. I tried to speed things up but it was kicking a dead horse and since their mother was a computer junkie (Can use it with ease and was on it when ever she was home) she finally got so pissed off of the BSoD when trying to check emails she asked me if I could put 98 on it. In the end I put win2k pro on it and it ran like a dream.

I tried ME on my main PC back then. Even with 512MB of ram it was complaining about memory and felt like I was running 95 on a 486SX with no co-microprocessor and 8MB ram.

I will give newer OSes a try for at least twenty-four hours and if I run into too many issues by then I get rid of it. Probably by time Win7 ends up like XP i'll switched to Linux and make the family suffer.