Submitted by “I have a confession to make, I used Windows Millennium Edition and I liked it. That doesn’t stop me making fun of it however. At a time where there was still a separation between consumer and enterprise operating systems, Windows ME was at the top of its class. What a lot of people forget or don’t even recognize to begin with is that Windows ME is actually a rather innovative and forward-looking operating system. Instead, almost everyone focuses on its reliability problems which can be largely attributed to the flaky and inherently unstable Win9x kernel.”
Well it was a good OS. Personally I’ve successfully run it and found it innovative. However, soon after I tried Windows 2000 and realized it was Windows ME and a whole lot more and decided to switch to a NT-based OS for good.
Even Microsoft executives admitted that Windows ME was a POS. I and my colleagues never had anything but troubles with it. It was Win9x with WinNT GUI slapped on top.
Let me guess, in 8 years time, 2016, somebody will write an article called ‘Why Windows Vista Deserves More Respect’?
Give me a break.
Actually Vista does deserve more respect. I did not upgrade any of my machines to Vista and was of the same opinion as most regarding Vista.
Then I bought a new machine with Vista preloaded. Outside of a few new issues I actually like Vista. I can actually see myself using Vista, and when I use XP I find it “old”.
Vista does deserve more respect than ME.
And Vista could after a couple of service packs develop into something good. Remember XP’s early days? Although not as bad as Vista today it didn’t have good reputation.
ME was dead from the beginning and pretty much no service pack could save it. The difference between Win98 and ME are minimal. I’m almost tempted to call ME Win98 with bugs.
Tha author claims that all the unstability lies in the Win9X-kernel. How come that Windows 98 where more stable than Win ME then? (Still not as stable as the NT-based OS though.)
Also, how could people not focus on stability problems? The times I tried ME(on 3-4 computers) it was so unstable that it was pretty much useless for anything serious. Whenever you worked on something you saved like crazy because you never new when the system might sudddenely fail on you again.
In an era where everyone was pooh-poohing XP as Microsoft’s Newest Flop, when the phrase “Year of the Linux Desktop” was just beginning its rounds, I was still using ME and preferring it. It was the last of the Windows OSs to use the *nix model of desktop-environment-riding-atop-command-line-OS (for better or for worse), and as such, there were some things that Just Worked better in ME. In addition, ME wasn’t inherantly unstable; anyone could keep a ME box functioning quite swimmingly if they were just savvy enough to know not to do Very Silly Things (unfortunately, this was just when scammers were hitting their stride and figuring out how to make silly things seem Internet-serious). Sure, ME was probably rushed out the door as a stopgap for people impatient for XP; but it was also a testbed for technologies XP needed to have down pat, and at the end of the day, ME Just Worked for me.
I got into XP about 3 years after everyone else. Still don’t regret it. (However, then I turned around and became a Vista early adopter. Go figure.) But wha hey; I remember fondly my time with the 32X of operating systems.
And I don’t care what anyone says, pinball in any form is a proof the developers are smiling down upon you.
Actually this is the reason that ME was a pile of crap, it DID NOT have a command line at all. They got rid of all the DOS compatibility, which after the release of Windows 2000 was the only reason to keep Windows 9x around. Windows ME was in essence a step between Windows 98SE and Windows 2000.
They got rid of the underlying DOS (as in WinNT) but didn’t even have the emulation running under it. To even run DOS with ME, you had to boot off of a floppy with DOS. Windows 98SE was the last worthwhile 16/32 bit operating system from Microsoft, afterward they went with the pure 32bit operating systems of Win2k and XP, then finally came out with 64bit after Win2k3 (which you can argue that there is a Windows XP 64bit, but it is built upon the 2003 kernel.)
XP even is kind of a ME of the NT line, but Vista is more so. Again, it seems that Vista will be a stop gap until the purely 64bit Operating Systems from Microsoft, especially since Windows 7 (what a lame name, though less lame than Vista) is coming out (supposedly) sometime in 2009. I recall at one point getting completely pissed off at Windows XP and was about to switch back to Windows 2000, but for some reason I couldn’t get it to even install on my newer hardware.
Fortunately for 98% of the time, I’m just using Ubuntu
“Actually this is the reason that ME was a pile of crap, it DID NOT have a command line at all. They got rid of all the DOS compatibility, which after the release of Windows 2000 was the only reason to keep Windows 9x around. Windows ME was in essence a step between Windows 98SE and Windows 2000.”
Don’t discuss things about which you have no knowledge please. Windows Me did have a command line, same as all the other versions of Windows 9x. What was different in Me was that MS removed the ability to boot the system in real mode.
“They got rid of the underlying DOS (as in WinNT) but didn’t even have the emulation running under it. To even run DOS with ME, you had to boot off of a floppy with DOS.”
Windows Me was architecturally identical to Windows 95 and 98, based on MS-DOS. They hid the ability to boot into real mode DOS.
“XP even is kind of a ME of the NT line, but Vista is more so. Again, it seems that Vista will be a stop gap until the purely 64bit Operating Systems from Microsoft, especially since Windows 7 (what a lame name, though less lame than Vista) is coming out (supposedly) sometime in 2009.”
I’m not sure there is any sane way to respond to this…
They did have DOS running under ME, It did not run in real mode at all. That’s why a large amount of DOS 9x software didn’t run all that well. ME was basically crap. That’s why it is so shunned. It didn’t have any real advantages over Windows 98, and Windows 2000 was already out and while it still had a bit to go as far as having drivers made for it, it was still far better in the stability range.
But I could say that I used ME for about the same length of time I used Vista. Which is long enough to know that they are both garbage (about a month).
They hid the DOS from the users. Kind of like them hiding anything useful in Vista.
http://www.infoworld.com/articles/op/xml/00/10/16/001016oplivingsto…
Edited 2008-03-20 00:30 UTC
Actually, ME did run ontop of DOS. There were just programming measures that disallowed one to boot to DOS. It’s possible to hack said measures and boot to pure MS-DOS 8.0. It didn’t emulate DOS.
This sounds interesting. My gf is still using Win ME right now, and as honorary sysadmin for this disaster I’m always looking for ways to make her (and my) life more bearable.
What are the benefits of accessing true DOS mode? and if there are some, where are these ‘hacks’ found at?
As I now don’t dare perform the six-monthly reinstall of her OEM CD (due to eight years’ worth of Windows Updates I can no longer access), I’m up for any tips that might help sustain the unhappy beast.
(For the record, I’ve tried advocating a move to a low-footprint Linux distro, but she won’t have it.)
Unless your girlfriend wants to use a DOS console and only have access to the first 1 MB of RAM, I seriously doubt she wants to run any version of real mode DOS.
Actually this is the reason that ME was a pile of crap, it DID NOT have a command line at all. They got rid of all the DOS compatibility, which after the release of Windows 2000 was the only reason to keep Windows 9x around. Windows ME was in essence a step between Windows 98SE and Windows 2000.
Me did indeed have a command line, they just worked extra hard at hiding it.
In essence, it was Windows 98 SE with the updating common controls library from Windows 2000 integrated into the explorer shell. Of course the changes were deeper than that considering the instabilities that people experienced, but it wasn’t caused by them removing DOS.
DOS was still very much running below the GUI, just hidden to a greater degree.
Me did introduce one nice feature that has found its way into every MS OS since, system restore.
Ironically, System Restore is one of those things that I used to have on my list of “Annoying Resource & Disk Wasting Crap” that I always disable as soon as I booted into a new XP setup. It never ran more than two minutes on my machine after a fresh install. I’ve found that if Windows is going to crap out, it’s going to crap out–there is no saving it, and in my experience, SysRestore never could. So why waste extra resources trying to “save” it? Not to mention, XP installed on an NTFS filesystem is a lot less likely to self-destruct in such severe ways that ME did on FAT32, making it even more useless.
Edited 2008-03-20 15:21 UTC
Are you kidding me? My cousin had gotten a brand spanking new ME box that he had bought and ME would have issues with the keyboard blanking. Just like all the other 9x based OSs it had MAJOR stability issues, there is nothing in this world that could prove to me otherwise. Who here enjoyed having their system spontaneously rebooting on them? What about random freezes? I sure as hell didn’t, the day I moved from win95, 98, ME to Win2k was the day I saw the light. Even on the same specced machine as the one that I ran win95 on the OS ran faster, more stable and I could run some major 3d apps without worrying about random freezes.
In conclusion WinME sucked bad. System restore, great but it didn’t always work or work all that well and your machine was still unstable as hell after you would use it. System file protection. this was just a joke, even a moderate user could screw up the system horribly without much effort in-fact all it took to compromise an XP machine was a rootkit on a Sony cd. What is the point of protecting the system files if they can still be accessed. The security policy (everyone is admin) is what’s flawed, you shouldn’t have to protect the system files because nothing should have access to it in the first place.
The rest was pretty cool at the time. I still think that Plug and Play is a misnomer, its more like plug this in and let windows badger you with 10 dialogs. The real kicker is that little has changed since the day this was implemented int he first place. they should take a cue from Apple and Linux, when I plug shit in , it either works or it doesn’t. How do I know it works? Because the OS puts it somewhere you can find it, if its an external drive a file browser opens, or a nice little icon shows up on your desktop. meanwhile in windows you get bombarded with pop-ups constantly trying to assure you that windows is doing something. Vista actually alleviated the issue, so thats a plus on them.
It’s Windows Me not ME fix the name please
Edited 2008-03-19 23:28 UTC
It is Windows ME, an acronym for Millennium Edition.
It is an acronym, but the e is lowercase for aesthetic reasons.
http://support.microsoft.com/ph/6519
Hey, be so kind as to explain what XP stands for to us?
XP is short for experience.
Xploding Pile. That will get me flamed…;-)
It can be both. It’s magic that way. Just like NT Technology is kind of redundant and isn’t at the same time.
Seriously, who could possibly care about whether the e should be uppercase?
Because the point is that it is a typo that should be corrected. If someone spells Linux like liNux it would be corrected. Or BeOS spelled like BEOS then it would be corrected.
That bad that people have to defend Windows Me now, people were saying leopard was a service pack, so whats WindowsMe?
I think this is a attempt to make Vista look better since people are comparing it to WindowsMe, make it look better and then Vista dont look so bad. Why else would this sort of think come out, it’s not going to make one bit of difference if WindowsMe really was as good as said.
Edit: Can’t fix title in edit but shows in preview
Edited 2008-03-19 23:35 UTC
For me, Windows ME was just one of these tips of the iceberg, where MS proved themselves and everybody else, how *far* they can go. They threw old shit mangled up to work even worse at their customers and … the customers literally _bought_ it.
Windows ME is a sad day in history in many aspects. First, it showed, how less you had to deliver these days to be respected as desktop operating system. Next, it was a typical result of a monopoly gone worst.
We should never wipe out Windows ME from our memory, it is an important lesson for future generations. The time has already come when the first blended men show up who actually defend that crime against humanity. Wehret den Anfängen!
Edited 2008-03-19 23:35 UTC
ME was good but kept getting too many blue screens.Forced me back to 98SE before I went to Win2K Pro.
I dont think it was ME’s fault since I think I recall having it underfed with ram and wanting to do too much at once.
Edited 2008-03-19 23:43 UTC
What do you try to say?
“ME was good, but well, actually it was bad. It even didn’t manage to survive while I used it. Sure it’s not ME’s fault, I just over-used it.”
Are you kidding yourself on this? I installed a brand new GNU/Linux system on an old laptop with 64 MB RAM. Is it slow? Yes. Does it swap often? Yes. Does it crash? No.
If expectations are that low, if you call an OS “good” while it bluescreens all the time, did you ever use even a semi good OS then?
Besides the blue screens it was good to use in my opinion.
I was excited about it.Windows 98SE was nice but not as much eye candy for example.
Maybe it was my overzealousness that caused them.When I tempered my use down it was fun and less problematic.Thats the best way I could put it.
While Me might have ushered in some new features to the Windows side that (eventually) proved quite useful and nice, in general it was a steaming pile of crap. 98SE was still quicker and more stable than Me and 2000 vastly outpaced it in per stability realms, let alone in scalability with the newer hardware (once drivers started to get written).
Thankfully, many of the “features” were worked on after its release and have finally finished in Vista as being usable (System Restore; finally works | Networking; better if slightly confusing/different interface | multi-media support finally fully integrated, etc.) and not slap happy thrown together.
Yeah, sure, it was fine at home. It ran. Locked up and BSOD’d a lot too, but it ran most of the time. System Restore sucked….never did anything useful. God forbid the computer would go to standby, or sleep. I liked the built in drivers for USB devices (thumb drives) out of the box. Basically, as long as you formatted your drive, and reinstalled Me once a year, it would run ok. Once the registry got crapped up, and orphaned dll’s started flying around, look out.
I wasn’t a big fan of windows ME but must say its the fastest booting OS i’ve seen. Even on old hardware it started in a few seconds.
Anyone else notice this?
I can name a few that boot faster than Me as long as you have compatible hardware. AmigaOS (3-4 sec), BeOS (7-9 sec), MorphOS (10-12 sec) MacOS 7.* to 8.6, and MenuetOS of course. I bet there are loads more systems that boots faster. And if you mean compared to other Microsoft OS-es then i found dos, 3.*, NT3.* NT4, win95 and win98 (as long as you updated the loaders properly) faster booting too. Even windows 2k can be made to boot faster with a few XP files slapped into the system.
You never tried BeOS did you?
I for one, vividly remember Windows ME. I bought my first laptop (I saved up quite a while for it), it was a Dell Inspiron 4000 P3 700mhz with 128 MB of RAM. I ran ME for about three weeks, after constant crashes, blue screens, I thought about pirating a copy of 98SE or try to run 2k on it. I decided I would jump head fist into Linux since I was sold an OS that didn’t work, and I wanted to try something else. I bought a copy of Redhat 7.0 (I think it came with a free hat). Some may look back on ME with fondness, I am not one of those people. I do admit though, without Windows ME I wouldn’t have learned about Lilo, lpr, the 2.4 kernel. Enlightenment 16, Gnome 1.X. I look back at that period happily.
FYI, I’m typing this up on a Dell Inspiron 1420 running Ubuntu.
Application innovation on top of an unstable kernel gets you no respect. Hmm, go figure.
I remember Windows ME being an irritating blip after Window 98. IE always crashed, media player crashed, networking stopped for no apparent reason. It was maddening I tell you. To add insult to injury, I usually couldn’t even shutdown the bloody thing without a crash. I started developing a crick in my neck from leaning under the table to hold down the reset button.
I was a Windows Me user at the time… and I have to say, even with all the problems the OS had (almost the same as W98/98SE)… the key ingredient for me was the Windows 2000-like network performance.
Most of the other features just made too much disk access making everything else feel slow and unresponsive… after disabling System Restore and some VM tips (fixed size) everything is just like before but with better networking.
Sorry, but the 3 or 4 times I saw Me boxes, it was nothing but trouble. It was incredibly unstable, far worse than 98se.
Funny thing is, most people who work in the IT/support industry rate it as the worst OS ever from Microsoft. Vista doesn’t even come close to being as bad.
Dave
Windows ME was TERRIBLE. You definitly had to be blessed by the gods, or blind and limbless to be free from the curse of Crashing ME brought to the table. Vista is worlds beyond ME in every aspect, and anybody who compares the two hasent used ME! They just heard it from someone else and thought it was funny. But We all know…. ME was not funny, not at all…
Very clever, say something crazy and people will listen and react, discuss, share their own [terrible/not-so-bad] experiences.
I’ll write that one down somewhere in my How to Manipulate the Crowd notes.
Next article in this series, I predict (you know, after The Deal, nothing was ever the same again): Suse Linux deserves more respect!
😛
Actually, I did find one good thing about the OS. It actually made Microsoft Bob look good. 🙂
Yeah since this can be simply put…
Windows 2000 professional was the first stable operating system “for the home market”. The mere fact that ME was released ½-a year later. And never got to work does make the article seem redicules.
Some people have used this opportunity to criticise Vista but I don’t see any reason for that yes It was released beta-ish and yes It did have a lot of compatibility issues but apart from that…
I remember XP when it first came to my view green-buttons wow thats ugly and strange.
I missed Windows 2000 – and I have a few friends that use it still – without having any other operating system at hand.
Of course I think XP deserves a lot criticism.
1. How could people – even office workers put up with such horrific designs.
There’s no need to say that I’m a gnome guy I like thinks to be simple.
I have recently started using Ubuntu. But before that I’ve used all the dummy versions of linux starting with mandriva and a lot off Fedora.
I have used the unstable version of Debian sid/lenny which ironicly I find to be quite stable.
I’m the unhappy owner of an AGP x1950 and Feisty Fawn is the easiest way to solve this problem.
For business use I use Vista and lets face it Office is still far ahead of OpenOffice. I’m a proof reader as a side-job and can’t live without M§ Office. OOO simply lags behind no matter how evangelistic one might be. This will be better in September but I doubt It will be good enough.
The point of all this babbeling is that If I had no knowledge of what a monoply Is I couldn’t possible understand how people put up with IE and WMP.
The Worst part about IE is it lack of “auto-search” function I don’t know what the actual term is but Firefox does this Strange that Microsoft can’t figure out how to steel the good stuff.
Apart from that there’s the what happens when something craches issue…
When IE craches It will try to “auto solve” the problem, which is no solution at all. It will shut down and restart. with out warning.
When FF craches (under Linux) it will mostly freeze This means that you can still see the page wich is actually an advantage at sometimes.
Finally I don’t understand why people put up with wmp
It’s slow and it crashes.
I love XINE VLC and “Kaffine” even though I’m a gnome guy “the reason that I like Kaffeine” is that It often works when I got problems with XINE
I also Love nautilus-cd-burner. Even though I use K3B sometime.
Isen’t there a CD-burner with windows by default: not If you ask me and I can’t understand why people put up with that.
In short give me Windows without IE and WMP
Or better yet give me linux with something that actually matches Office. And easy synchronization with my hand-held devices: currently a P990
PS this post was not written under the influence of drugs I just feel that in the criticism of the “bad and ugly” people mostly fail to state the obvious.
“I have a confession to make, I used Windows Millennium Edition and I liked it.”
Are you high?
Oh dear, can we please just forget that Windows Me ever existed and move on with technology? Why dig up a dead cat?
“Why dig up a dead cat?”
For the very same reason you’d put a Windows 9x box online… to harvest worms ;^)
Most of the things the article listed are things I either disable in XP or don’t install at all, and most of the rest of it was available in Win2k.
Win2k was just miles ahead of WinME, and blew it out of the water. Even Win98SE was better, even if it didn’t have all of the feature that ME had, because it was more stable.
And Vista is just …. meh.
Edited 2008-03-20 06:14 UTC
You do realise that there is a separation just now, everywhere? There is a dozen flavours of Vista, there has always been consumer an enterprise MS products and of course, you have home and pro users Linux all over the show.
Kinda “I am a pervert but i deserve more respect”
I always found Windows Me very quick and stable. However at the time i was dual booting between Windows Me and NT 4.0 / later Win2k. I used NT for work and Me for games, didn’t install any other crap in Me. It was incredibly fast at running games.
Never had problems with games with Windows 2000(The release version anyway, the beta didn’t like DirectX.)
Now come on, how is that unnatural, without stability it doesn’t matter much what features you can cram into anything whatsoever, since nobody will be able to use those features reliably, thus the whole package will quickly go down the toilet, as it well should. It doesn’t much matter what ME could have been, fact is, it didn’t become anything other than a joke.
All I can remember of Windows Me was that it was incapable of playing MP3s without skipping while copying files. Windows 98 did it without problem on the exact same hardware, but Me just stuttered everytime I tired to anything vaugly I/O related while playing MP3s. I few weeks later I upgraded to NT4 and was happy.
I never understood all the derision for ME.
If you chose good hardware with stable drivers, ME worked fine.
I NEVER had problems with it.
Used Windows ME for a few years – upgraded from Win95 OSR2.1 to get full USB support. Never had a stability problem – but then again, I had good hardware too, which was the key to WinME running well – good hardware with good drivers.
It was a perfect upgrade for Win95 users to get up-to-date, which was probably a more realistic target for it.
But I have to wonder – would Microsoft have been able to get users to use WinXP (or even Win2k) so easily if WinME was liked more than it was? I think not. I liked using WInME and had no reason to upgrade to WinXP.
In fact, I really can’t stand WinXP’s native look – and always revert it to the WinMe/Win2k look instead. I always felt WinXP’s native look was dramastically eX-Professional.
Conversely, I really like Vista’s native look; however, I last used Vista RC2 – and have heard most of the problems were from changes since then. I could really see myself using the Vista interface; but I don’t have the time to risk it.
Right now – when I can, I use Linux for me desktop – KDE does quite nicely that way. 😉
Windows ME sucked because it had no tolerance to driver bugs, which almost always exist. It would just panic the kernel instantly.
Windows ME was half-baked and not really well tested by Microsoft development team. Microsoft probably just released it to showcase a new consumer OS for the millenium.
Actually that goes to what I’ve pretty much always said about Windows ME – it was a great OS, just didn’t have the ‘holes’ in it that Windows programmers had come to expect and rely on.
I’m sure it was probably pretty well tested – it just wasn’t very exposed to non-standard following software/drivers/etc; thus when things didn’t match the spec. they didn’t work right.
I think Windows ME was probably one of the best products Microsoft ever released – it followed the spec. very nicely. The problem was it didn’t allow for deviation from the spec, which too many developers came to rely on, and so it got a bad name. In order to be so well programmed to the spec though, it would have had to have been thoroughly tested. As I said above, I believe it just didn’t have the ‘holes’ punched through it for non-spec. expectations.
That said, I think that really helped pave the way for the transition to the NT kernel based series (2k, XP, etc.) as the NT series is a lot less forgiving when not following the spec. than the 9x series was. So, Microsoft released Windows ME with no breakage from the spec, forcing developers to get in-line and start paying more attention to the spec, and fixing things that made it easier for software to transition to Win2k/XP later on.
The question still stands though, would Microsoft have been able to successfully move customers to Windows XP if Windows ME had not gotten the reputation it did?
To take the thought even further, might Vista be another such move on Microsoft part, knowing it worked in the past?
I bought a computer off someone for $200 because they thought it was broken but it turned out to just be a crappy OS. I had every problem you could think of. Internet connectivity, scanner, printer, media playback… everything was a chore.
I think this says it : http://xkcd.com/323/
Ok so windows ME was a disaster. But so was win98. At least ME was miles ahead of win98 when it came to stability.
I was running OS 9. It had its own issues, but I’m glad I never had to run Me…
Windows ME is a POS and there is no getting around that. It should never ever happened.