Windows Me - Microsoft's Biggest Failure
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- Опубликовано: 22 июл 2021
- In 2000, Microsoft had no idea that their current project, Windows ME, would be such a failure in the computer industry.
What should be considered the greatest computer product failure? The worst operating system ever made? Such questions always lead to some controversy, but at the same time, leave a lot of people coming to the same conclusion: “That award goes to Windows ME."
But this leads to another interesting question: What about Windows ME? You know, the OS which came out right after Windows 98 in the year 2000, intended to set Microsoft up for the 21st century, ME standing for “Millennium Edition.” Even though it was meant to be just another improvement of Windows, that ended up not being case. Instead, customers were just left furious, wondering why Microsoft would push out such an obviously incomplete and terrible product. Consequently, Windows ME has since been labeled by many tech enthusiasts as “the Worst Operating System of All Time.” That’s a pretty harsh and defamatory label, so what on earth did Microsoft do? I like to think of Windows ME as the emo phase of Microsoft. They were clearly having a bit of an identity crisis and figuring out how to properly express themselves. They didn’t know what they wanted the future of Windows to be.
To further add to this, Microsoft made the wise decision of releasing a very similar looking version of Windows called Windows 2000 at around the same time as Windows “Millenium” Edition. In fact, I have to admit, while doing my research, there were a few times where I actually found myself mixing up Windows ME with Windows 2000, and I frantically had to make changes. It was a pretty silly mistake, but it wasn’t exactly an uncommon one either, at least in the year 2000. You see, during this time, the upcoming Windows 2000 and Windows ME operating systems were both being marketed in similar but different ways. Windows 2000 was going to be the business-oriented version of Windows, whereas Windows ME was going to be strictly for consumers, home users. Because of this, these were, respectively, just upgrades of Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 98. Windows 2000 was built on the newer, more stable Windows NT codebase while Windows ME was still built on the 9x codebase, which was quickly becoming outdated and unstable. But a lot of users didn’t know this, for reasons that I will get into later.
Instead, they thought they were essentially just getting a home version of Windows 2000, which was released seven months prior, but this actually wasn’t the case. The reality is, the two versions may have appeared similar, but were different, VERY different. And after people made their upgrades, this became quickly apparent, and ME seemed to be the exact opposite of their expectations. Blue screen of deaths plagued the system, sometimes when the user wasn’t even running any programs. Lack of a DOS mode from previous versions made it incredibly difficult for users to install older software, and of course, frequent hardware compatibility issues made the OS virtually unusable. But it all really boils down to one question: Is Windows ME really deserving of such a reputation as the worst operating system, or was it similar to Windows Vista and just, partially, misunderstood? Today, we are going to talk about what exactly led Windows ME to be so heavily criticized and whether or not much of it is even warranted.
Windows ME’s infamous legacy seems to stem from what typically goes wrong with most failed Microsoft products, the development and marketing. The issues that were particular to Windows ME was miscommunication on Microsoft’s end, the operating system’s lack of recognition, and of course, it’s lack of capability. I mentioned that a huge component of Windows ME’s downfall was the fact that it was controversially based on a separate kernel from Windows 2000, but we really need to understand why this was the case. It might be surprising since it came out a year later, but one thing that was significantly responsible for ME’s downfall was the development of Windows XP. Just at the start of XP’s development, Microsoft mentioned that they were working on a new version of Windows codenamed Neptune. This was meant to be the very first consumer-based Windows that would be built on the NT platform.
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Fun fact: Just to show how much confusion there was (and still is) around Windows ME and 2000, the Windows ME Wikipedia article actually says *”Not to be confused with Windows 2000”* at the top.
Funny thing was windows 2k and windows ME are 2 different OSes under the hood. Windows ME was just DOS executable program like other Win 9X version, meanwhile Windows 2000 based on NTKernel which is used by their modern OS today. Tech savvy in the late 90s knows this very well. They just has similar UI to end user because Microsoft has a lazy RnD UI/UX designer team 🤭
Well NT's previous version was 3.51 and didn't follow the year of release naming convention, but I doubt anyone who used the previous NT and 9X would confuse the 2 after 1 minute of using them.
Microsoft likes to make confusion. Look how they mark xbox consoles. Xbox One x was mistaken with xbox series x, so people were buying older console thinking it's newer. .
win 2000 & win 2000 server were the enterprise version.
@@Ometecuhtli there was nt 4.0
The first family computer had ME. So I grew up thinking computers were all just unstable crash machines.
Yep, exactly the same experience as you.
Same here
Me, but with 7, so I was left assuming all computers were slow and laggy.
It crashed just as much as 98 and 95!
@@AGZhark Are you mixing it up with Vista? Unless you had a crappy netbook or an extremely out of date PC, 7 ran well on most computers to my knowledge
My older brother was all proud when he brought home a copy of ME to install on the home computer. He was hyping it up like it was the second coming. I think it lasted about 2 weeks on our computer. My mom literally told him to "get rid of this shit". We went back to 98.
I can imagine your brother must have been disappointed when you guys had to go back to Windows 98.
xD
I remember starting this PC normally for about a month, then some bullshit like "WinLogOn.exe has stopped working" along with Brontox virus (which I remember it was written in Indonesia about save the environment). Despite all that annoyance, yeah. I grew up with that and enjoy using ME along with XP, Vista, 7.
😂😂
MS ME lasted one week on my computer, then trash can.
I think Windows ME shaped my professional career. When I was a kid I was already used to format the C drive, diagnose the programs in safe mode, creating recovery floppy disks, reinstall the system from scratch, install the drivers,... All that was a natural path to follow... Thanks Windows ME! 🙂
Same here lol. I feel like I work in the tech field now because as a kid i had to constantly troubleshoot our family computer running windows ME. Either I fixed it, or I didnt get to play to Quake 3 lol
I never thought about this but I have exactly the same past experiences! Thank you Windows ME, you weren't so bad after all!
Trying to coax Millennium Edition into working properly as a child literally set my career as a computer engineer
I have faint memories of fixing lots of stuff in ME but even if I wasn't that young at the time (I was 14), I'm quick to unlearn stuff and adapt to new environments so it feels like just a fever dream.
@@pomponi0 what a good weakness to have 🤣
@@tomikaka The OS installstion screen literally gave me flashbacks of the first time I formatted a PC lmao. I had 256MB of RAM, too little to run the powerful XP and I wasn't going to use an old af OS like Windows 98.
@@pomponi0 I only encountered Windows ME on my grandpa's old PC. My first computer already had 4 Gigabytes of ram.
@@tomikaka 4 giga of ram can run windows 10 i think.
Because ME was my first OS I became very good at debugging OSs even today.
That is awesome!! Love to hear that! :)
Oh cool
Well done! Turning tragedy to triumph, lemons into lemonade! Huzzah!!
@@orphenocou4742 when life gives you lemons, dont make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I dont want your darn lemons, what am i supposed to do with these!?
@@theeclipsemaster Okay Mr Johnson
I was a computer science student at this time. Windows 98 was my first Windows ever. While more stable than ME, ME felt more modern and faster. However, it was very fragile and needed to reinstall it every 3 months. But I loved it.
Despite the similarities between ME and 2000, they were never the same. 2000 was my first attempt with an NT-based system, and I felt it from the beginning. May be because computer was my specialty. But apart from that, 2000 was certainly not suitable for consumers. However, it was way more robust, smoother, and its UI was more advanced than 9x. XP made all that easier for consumers after that.
I used ME for only a year or so, but it’s still very nostalgic for me.
I was a consumer and I used 2000 until 2005, when I finally upgraded to XP.
A few notes from someone who remembers the era well:
(1) Microsoft had been trying to move over to the NT line much earlier than this video implies. I knew people who worked at Microsoft and the original game plan was for Windows 95 to be the last (and only) consumer 9x OS, while Windows 3.51 was supposed to be the last strictly business oriented version of NT. Windows NT 4.0 was slated to become what XP eventually became- the version of Windows which merged the consumer and business lines.. As early as 1993, Microsoft had started taking steps in that direction with Win32s- an environment to run 32 bit programs in the 16 bit DOS/Windows 3.x environment. For various reasons, NT 4.0 never became the version of Windows which combined the two platforms.
(2) Windows 95 was finally released to great fanfare. For the average consumer, DOS was gone, but those of us who understood the technology knew DOS was still there- you could even make it rear its ugly head by changing the config file so it would drop you into a DOS prompt instead of the GUI. Windows 9x used the same thunking technology that Win32s used and it could sometimes create instability. But consumers seemed happy with Windows 95 so Microsoft sort of delayed the move to consumer NT. Microsoft had bigger fish to fry such as the fact that they had been caught with their pants down when the internet was taking off and they weren't a major player (at that point). Besides, PC gaming was just starting to become a really big thing at that point and much of that was DOS games. The way Windows 9.x handled DOS programs was different than the way Windows NT handled them. The NT VDM was more elegant than the 9x solution, but the downside was that NT had little tolerance for games which tried to access the hardware directly- which was pretty much all DOS games. So Windows 98 was supposed to be the stopgap- one last DOS based Windows before it was merged into NT.
(3) Until a few months before the release of Windows NT 5.0, Microsoft intended for it to be the first consumer release of NT. They had even named it Windows 2000 with a "Professional" and "Home" edition. Windows 2000 was actually the first version which provided an upgrade path from Windows 9x to Windows NT- you could upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. But the Windows 2000 Home edition was never released. Why? I remember upgrading from Windows 98 to 2000 and I was excited until the upgrade was complete and released my modem and sound card were not working. No drivers so I ended up buying a new modem and sound card. I had better luck with 16 bit Windows and DOS games, but it was maybe an 80% success rate- much better than NT 4.0, but still unacceptable for a consumer version of Windows at the time.
(4) So Microsoft once again moved the line in the sand- Whistler (ie. XP) was to be the first consumer NT OS. Still, this left Microsoft with a long period (at the time) between consumer editions. Sure, Windows 98SE was as different from (the original) 98 as 98 was from 95, but that wasn't the public's perception. Windows 98 Second Edition was never marketed as a new version of Windows- it was mostly an OEM release while stores quietly replaced the old Win 98 with the SE edition. So the decision was made to release Windows ME. Somehow, ME and Vista are lumped together as the two worst versions of Windows, but that's where the similarities end. Windows Vista's biggest flaw was it was too much. ME's biggest flaw was it was just a bunch of shit basically all thrown together. Even after MS had decided that Whistler would be THE Operating System, they continued creating nightly builds of the Windows 9x line. Maybe the plan was to create some legacy OS for very very low end computers (or specialized markets like POS register systems). This OS became Windows ME and Microsoft knew it was the mistake edition from the moment it was released...
May allah bless Imam Khomeini
Interesting story. My impression also though experience working with them, they miss the focus on planning, development and delivery and more too much towards sales.
This is a much more accurate interpretation. _Some_ consumers may have been confused about the difference between 2K and ME, but Microsoft was always very clear on this. The Enterprise track was NT-based, the home track was 9x-based. They had been planning to merge the two kernels for a while, but the hardware requirements of NT were _substantial,_ and the average consumer wasn't ready for that yet. They needed a more lightweight OS, and that meant compromising the design to fit within the constraints of that limited hardware.
ME was indeed a bit of an afterthought, but it wasn't an accident, and I would say that _most_ people had no trouble figuring out which product was right for them. I'm sure there were a few lost souls standing in the aisle of a computer store holding the two boxes side-by-side to figure out which was the right one, but probably no more than had done the same with NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 95. We were all new to computers at some point in our lives. Just look at how many people ran Windows XP Pro at home, and tell me they absolutely _had to have_ domain login capability, multiple video cards, advanced file sharing features, or support for multiple CPUs. No, many just saw "Pro" and thought, "this is the better one, so I will buy this one."
Anyway...
Win 2K was slated to be the confluence of the two mainline Windows kernels, but there were a few very real problems with that:
1) It was _still_ a little bit heavy for consumer hardware -- particularly RAM.
2) It used a new driver model, and even de-facto commodity hardware had minimal support under NT. Your SCSI cards and NICs -- sure. No problem. But sound cards, 3D graphics, and MPEG decompression accelerators? Not so much... Even if there were drivers available, you probably wouldn't get complete functionality. You would be missing a lot of the bells and whistles.
3) Software hadn't been written to support a multi-user security model. Everyone was admin, all the time. Documents folders were in their directories right off of the drive root, or under the Windows directory. Writing to per-user document folders and having to deal with file system permissions (like being able to write to the program's installation folder) was a real problem. This made the migration to NT very painful for users, when programs would just crash or throw cryptic error messages on launch, exit, or just randomly.
Mostly, it boiled down to: NT needed time for developers to get used to it. It had existed for a while, but it was kind of a niche product. People weren't running Paint Shop Pro and Doom95 under NT. They were running development environments, and GIS mapping programs, and databases. They ran on HP, IBM, and Compaq hardware -- not Bob's Computer Emporium white-box builds. This was clear to Microsoft, and they realized it wasn't quite the right moment to release Win2K to the masses.
With the advent of Active Directory, it enjoyed massive success in the Enterprise space, though. People started using it instead of Windows 95/98 as their desktop OS at work. That meant NT was exposed to more hardware and more software, and developers and hardware OEMs got onboard to ensure compatibility and full support. This primed the market for XP's release, which was finally able to merge the two codebases, once and for all.
I see the release of ME as Microsoft being agile enough to see the potential disaster of forcing everyone to NT before the market was ready. It was the right move, and even managed to bring the visual identity of the two products almost perfectly inline with each other. And if you've ever used NT 4.0 and 95, you know that the similarities pretty much end with a screenshot of an empty desktop, whereas (aside from obvious giveaways like the branding on the Start menu), you might not be able to tell the difference between ME and 2K quite so easily.
2000 was the era of the cheap eMachines home PC and most of those came with 64MB of RAM. 128MB minimum was needed to run Windows 2000 well. I ran it on 64MB of RAM and that really just wasn't enough.
As you say, there was also the driver issues with NT at the time. A lot of hardware aimed at consumers, such as sound and graphics cards, didn't have NT drivers or if they did, they didn't have some of the features of the 9x drivers. XP actually had a rough first year or so largely due to this issue.
It's understandable why MS did ME, but they should have just delayed it a few months to get closer to 2000 and released 98SE as ME. Had they done that, it would have been a lot more well recieved. I've never seen ME run better than 98SE on any system.
My first day college, I installed Windows ME on my PC, and it brought down the entire college network. After tracking down my PC as the source and running some tests, the IT department banned the OS from campus.
LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
How does an OS installment bring down an entire Network 😭
LOL
That is really funny.
@@Flameb0 wait seriously?? 😂 😂
I can remember in high school I was trying to explain to my friend why Windows XP was better than Me.
He really wouldn't budge. That was the day I learned about how stubborn narcissistic people can be. I wonder if he's still out there somewhere using Windows Me...
Ok first of all : LOL that was funny.
I remember also not wanting to go to XP from Me because my games weren't working on XP when it released. Compatibility issues, so I was like "fuck this" and stuck with Me until 2004 when someone informed me they had patched it significantly. So yeah maybe he didn't want to move for compatibility reasons. I wouldn't have budged either. Then 2004, XP, been using it until new games wouldn't work on it.
@@praetorian3902 I completely agree with you, people have really short memory, they don't remember real reasons why people used Win 98/ME for so long time. Ofcourse XP was better OS, but I remember how popular 90s games were and I am not talking only about DOS games, even early Windows games had problems in XP, so I switched to XP permanently I think in 2005, but I was still sad for games which don't work there.
I've just built my dream Win ME PC with tualatin Pentium III and GeFroce Ti4200 and I realized that compatibility of some games is not only about Windows, some games need specific GPU drivers to make it run, it's really complicated with some games. For example Aliens vs Predator, I know, there is fixed GOG version, but I like to play original versions just for fun and original AvP is really hard to make functional. There are sound and graphics glitches in XP, but even in 98/ME it's not so easy. I don't understand how could we make all those games functional when I was 11 or 12 years old, I was probably smarter than today. :-D
@@Pidalin What a nice reply, I enjoyed reading it. And you helped me remember some nostalgic things like Avp, Geforce Ti4200 so that was also appreciated. Yeah when you're 11-13yo AND have Pentium 3 back in the day you feel like the luckiest kid ever because every game would run smoothly. I played Sims 1 on my first PC AMD 150 Mhz and it lagged like hell, took me 1 minute to have my sim move to the next room (that taught me patience), was doing my homework while waiting for that to happen lol. Then upgraded to 750 Mhz and couldn't stop smiling the first time I played. I remember going to my friend's house to play Comanche 3 the first time and I was like "wow you got a Pentium 3 !!!" lol We were cute when we were kids weren't we :)
@@praetorian3902 You enjoyed my broken English? :-) I had always really good HW, but mostly like 5 years after it was relevant. :-) I had my first Pentium II (400 MHz) in 2004, later I had some PIII 550 MHz and GF5200, we played even FarCry on that, it was almost unplayable, but who cares, start game and see it was enough. :-)
When I try it today with similar HW, I realize how badly all those games worked on that but I don't remember it, I have only nostalgic and good memories about playing on that, today we are angry when FPS jumps down from 90 to 70, it's really funny compared to how we played back in the day. :-)
@@Pidalin Your English is great. Yeah I think it's mostly young gamers that complain about the FPS (12-22yo) because when you're a gamer from the late 90s early 2000s, you KNOW what real FPS drop means xD
During Vista (!) time, I met a former senior manager for Microsoft. She told me that nobody in Microsoft *ever* mentioned ME, and referred to it as "that OS".
Wow. It was THAT BAD?
I loved the minimalism of windows 2000. To me, it was the best business OS.
As a kid I remember my dad upgraded our PC with 98SE to ME. It lasted about a day before we reverted back to 98. Crashes all around, absolutely awful. Then when I got my own PC with XP in it, it felt like a quantum leap in every single aspect.
not that bad
My experience was the opposite. ME was much more stable for me than 98SE.
Win 98 had completely same problems with stability, ME is just like Win 98 with extra service pack. I remember installing Win 98 SE every week, it was really unstable os, ME was better I think, when you installed drivers really for ME, that's important. 98 drivers mostly worked, but it could cause stability problems or other bugs.
Well, I had these problems about Windows ME having a shitty startup that kept on crashing every time it occurs. In 2000 before I was born, my family bought a computer that operates Windows ME and they got pissed off on starting it up, due to this preposterous phenomena that I said before. When they tried to ask a computer specialist to fix it, it did not work well, and it continued that shitty problem that it had before. So you're right that Windows ME keeps on crashing, especially when it tries to start up.
Sounds like me with XP vs Vista.
My friend's copy of ME decided to no longer run executables at one point. This was fixed by right clicking and hitting properties - just viewing them, not changing anything. Just a system that seemed at war with itself.
Ah yes the "it fixed itself"
Same happened with my Windows 10
No you are confused
I lead a group that developed security software for Windows. We replaced core parts of the OS and shipped software tailored for each Windows flavor (W95, W98, W98SE, NT4, W2000). When ME came out we took a look under the hood, quickly realized that it was a technical disaster with countless bugs. Most machines we tried simply could not run it. So no support from us. I have always suspected that Microsoft intentionally torpedoed ME to kill off the W95 branch and move people on to NT. The reason people kept using W95/W98 was that it could run on the first generation single core Pentium machines and even 486es.For NT you needed to scrap your three year old PC and get a new one, which people did not want to do.
I remember running an RC3 build of ME back in late 1999. It was fast, behaved well, and had a lot of really cool features. Somewhere between RC3 and Gold, MS really dropped the ball. Many of the new things did make it into XP though.
Amusingly as a kid, I never knew of Windows ME's existence. My family's computer went from 95 to 98 to XP (Before 95 I was too young to comprehend what OS they ran and beyond XP I was older and more aware of the situation, even having my own personal computer), so for a long time I just figured XP was the Windows OS after 98.
Same, I always knew of 95, 98 and XP. But I was always curious why boxes would also mention these mythical "2000, ME" versions when mentioning compatible OSs.
Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if most people not deep into computing did that. 95 then 98 then XP. Just as many people skipped Vista and even Windows 8 and went from XP to 7 to 10.
@@JJAB91 Mine went from 98 to XP to 7 to XP to 10 to 7 to 10 again, and now to Linux and probably 7 again.
@@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge LMAO that's a very interesting upgrade history
@@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge What the hell happened
Windows ME was a misunderstood failure, for a lot of reasons.
This video gets a lot right, but overplays the role of Neptune and Whistler. Most people didn't keep up on those things, and power-users knew the difference. If you knew what Whistler was, you also knew Me wasn't it. That's just not something I heard much confusion over at the time. Absolutely if you were just buying a computer and didn't read up on news (or rumors) about MS, like most people, you wouldn't have known moving to NT was a thing - I would guess most people at the time didn't know what NT was unless they had a reason to. It was never marketed to consumers, and was even discouraged for home use.
First problem then, was the name. Calling the follow-up to 95 and 98 "Me", and the follow-up to NT4 "2000" confused a lot of people. I mean, they switched the numbered version, and the letter version's name - and a majority of people (aside from computer geeks) I knew at the time assumed Windows 2000 was the new Windows 95. I had awkward conversations trying to explain NT to people. People still believe 2000 was the successor to 95/98.
Then, marketing. The OS sort of came out of nowhere, and 98se was still popular (it was still recent). With the name confusion already an issue, the marketing consisted of ads saying "Meet Me!" and touting things that probably weren't accurate (much like Vista's marketing).
The big concern back then with consumers was two things: speed, and crashing. Everyone complained that their computer was too slow, regardless of how fast it really was, and crashing was 9x's biggest feature. So the question people would ask when a new thing came out was "will this make my computer faster?" Almost always. Pushing out a new version of Windows like this made people assume their computers would be faster (nope) and crash less (nope). Anyone who upgraded expecting those was gravely disappointed. Which is to say, pretty much everyone who installed it.
The weird thing is, it actually almost was a great OS. Underneath, it was basically Windows 98 Third Edition. It seems more stable and actually less prone to crashes. I used it for almost a decade, and it worked great...however, I didn't use the normal version. More on that later...
As noted, DOS mode was removed, while the DOS Prompt inside Windows remained. However, in reality, DOS was still there. As with most Me issues, the features were simply locked away, and if changed, would be "repaired" automatically, making them near impossible to use...but they weren't removed. An interesting side effect was that autoexec.bat and config.sys were still generated - but were blank. The system still needed them to exist. If you edited them, they would be blanked out again.
The next issue was bloated software. The OS itself was still basically Windows 98, however many of the applications that came with Windows were replaced with new versions. Previously, Windows required I believe a Pentium 90. With Me, that suddenly jumped to a Pentium 350 minimum. Recommended was higher. Odd part being that the OS itself wasn't that different, with two exceptions. The first reason for the jump was the software being pointlessly bloated. Biggest example was Media Player, which now boasted features such as skins, and provided the same (actually fewer) functions as before, but requiring more RAM and CPU to load. Apps like CDPLAYER were replaced with placeholders that simply launched Media Player. If you upgraded, your familiar apps would be slower, do less, and were kind of tacky. You really needed a newer computer to handle them. One reason was competition from software such as RealPlayer, which in the late 90s was a major competitor to WMP. MS had a strategy of integrating free alternatives to competing software into the OS (like IE to crush Netscape, MSNMess against ICQ and AIM, etc). Real and WMP were fighting to see who could be slower and more bloated at the time. MS' strategy ultimately won out, nobody talks about RealNetworks anymore. (Tragically, WINAMP was better than either, and could run on a potato.)
There was a change to the driver system, I don't recall too much there, but for the most part drivers still worked. Any time they change Windows, some old drivers always break, and people always get furious. Changing how drivers worked caused a lot of problems, which as usual, would be fixed with driver updates - though even that was impacted by the confusion with 2000 as to which version to update. Me's unpopularity and the arrival of XP meant a lot of drivers probably never got made. Obviously, hardware without drivers, or broken drivers, is going to wreak havoc on your computer, resulting in many complaints about Me.
But the real culprit of Me's disaster was a little thing called PCHealth. Or rather, a bunch of things. For XP, MS intended a ton of new system tools to simplify or automate maintenance, for instance, System Restore. I feel Me was used as a prototype for these features - which were not quite ready for deployment. The OS would always be looking for changes, making backups, rewriting files it didn't like, monitoring everything - and it was bad at its job. My favorite glitch was when I played a DOS game which Windows decided was an important program, and tracked every single change it made. It would make backups constantly. After an hour or two, the game would be unplayable - often before that, I'd get a warning about low disk space, because every single action the software did that wrote to disk would result in backups - now this game which was a few KB was taking about 2 GB of space. This was a glitch in System Restore, which didn't work anyway. I don't recall ever once having a successful restore on Me, it always messed up. To this day, I don't trust SR because of it. Once again, PCHealth would undo any attempts to make the OS work properly - its job was ensure the OS stayed broken, and used a lot of resources to make that happen. This is where the slowdowns and crashes likely came from, the combination of bloated features, an automated maintenance system that didn't work, and bad drivers.
I had an altered version, which did two things - unlocked DOS, and removed PCHealth from the system. I wish I remembered the details on it, but it's been over 20 years. With PCHealth removed, many but not all of the automatic things stopped, and the system was more responsive. For the applications, I cracked open the CAB files on a 98 disc and copied the old versions back over - most of the time it worked (but you had to be careful not to trigger Me's repairs, which would restore the broken software - you could never open Media Player, perhaps giving a hint as to what it was doing that made it so slow to load).
After restoring DOS, removing PCHealth and System Restore and such, and restoring the features of 98se, and had the right drivers for everything, doing a clean install rather than an upgrade, what I had seemed like a smooth, more stable version of Windows 98. The potential was there. It could have been the best version of 9x, but I believe was really just trying to push people toward upgrading to XP by making 9x look more outdated than it was. Releasing broken software to push you to new software was also in MS' playbook, as was inflating system requirements to force upgrades. They still do this kind of thing today.
Very insightful information. Thank you for taking the time to comment, and thanks for watching! :)
man you wasted 10 years worth of your touchscreen keyboard trying to type this comment 😂😂😂😂
In short the made a broken product of something that could be decent trying to make it over appealing by filling it with useless garbage, that and/or intentionally making the system shitty so people would switch to XP
Very interesting and insightful, thanks.
My thoughts exactly. Thanks for this additional information
Back then anyone who understood slightly bit of computers, knew that Windows ME was based on a DOS kernel like the former Windows versions (except Windows NT). There was no confusion with Windows 2000 Pro (based on the NT kernel). The problems with ME were compatibility, stability, missing DOS mode, missing 3rd party software/driver support etc. But PCs that came pre installed with Windows ME, didn't had these problems, or at least not that prevalent.
Slightly off topic, one of the major benefits of 98SE, was the ability to strip the install down to just what you needed(for advanced users). That left 98SE actually very stable, something not seen again until XP - the stability I mean. Good video, thanks a lot, cheers NZCH
To be honest 12 year old me in 2000, probably wasn’t too bothered with issues in ME as long as there were games that installed and played, I was happy. And that Windows Media Player (with skins and visualizations) and startup sound are memorable to this day.
i was when my brother changed 98 with 2000 and couldnt play dos games
i did not even know win me existed until a few months ago. my first Os was win xp when i was 6 in 2011
Well I was 25 back then. I have been in the computer industry ever since then and It wasnt as bad as people say. DONT GET ME WRONG. it wasnt great. It was OK at best. BUT, it wasnt that damn bad. I look at it as a transition period. 16 and 32 bit. I get the feeling that people who make these videos werent even BORN or were 10 when windows ME was released.
About the same, I was using ME up till like 2005 or 6.
@@alwaysangry2232 That's a good point, it's easy to judge ME now, but today people have no idea what was ME good for. It was last Win 9x OS with DOS support, but it already had some modern features from Win 2000, so it was actually good OS for home user in 2000. Also boot time was really good compared to Win 2000. People in 2000 needed mainly support for older software and games, so Win 2000 (even when it was good OS) was useless for them.
The ME actually stood for Major Embarrassment.
Haha! Fair enough.
Nah, it is Mistake Edition
Millennium edition
@@axelestial r/sisthisaintreddit
Many Errors
When I got my first ever PC it had Me pre-installed, and I remember feeling super smug because my friends had 98 and didn’t have the ability to burn CDs. For years I was convinced Me was brilliant but thinking about it now and watching this video, I think I’m just clouded by nostalgia, haha. Still, I’ll always have pretty fond memories of my first years online with that OS.
Early 1998, I had Win 98 running on my own PC when it pulled in one Virus. Friend suggested I shall switch to Linux. I did. Then in 2001 I was ask to help one person to fix Windows-Me on her PC. Another friend usually took care of her, but he moved towns. So I encountered Windows-Me for the first (and only) time. I had started with Win 3.11 on one Laptop, but I felt Windows-Me was the worst I encountered. I could not fix the problems, (had to search the Internet then I discovered it was one Virus) and since she used just a few basic programs, no gaming she wanted me to install Linux. Wiped the PC clean, installed ME just in case, and one simple Desktop-Linux, So I made the PC dual-boot. When she wanted to play some games she used Win, (as for that it was usable ASFAIR) , she unplugged the cable to the modem so that she was off-line, as she did not want to spend a lot of money on Anti-virus Software. For serious work though, she needed to be online, writing letters and e-mails to friends (in another script as she was from Bulgaria) she used the Linux I had installed. Years later when it came to replace her computer and my other friend got her one with one newer Windows (maybe XP) her world was made whole again. She did not need Linux any longer. But *Windows-Me was so bad in those years that other people fed up with the OS changed over to Linux* entirely....
Well, since CD writing software were always provided with CD-R drives, the built-in WinME CD-R software wasn't a real advantage, on the contrary it performed really poorly compared to Nero or even Adaptec EZ-CD Pro.
@@chucku00 Well I used Linux and I still got CD-R from before 2000, that I burned using a script in one terminal no fancy eye-candy but later I did switch to a GUI-version, haven't burned a CD or DVD in a very long time....
@@isallah1kafir196 I know cdrdao (and also k3b) were available before 2000, I was just responding to Kirk about the fact the embedded WinME CD-R software was easy to use but really simplistic compared to older Win9x third party software that allowed to write CD-Rs in ways that aren't supported by the WinME CD-R utility (SAO, hybrid, UDF, RAW or even copy PlayStation discs).
But thanks for making me think about installing K3B on my Linux system since I still have to write some CD or DVD from time to time.
@@chucku00 Thanks I've installed my first Linux SuSE 5.2 in 1998 and have used many distro versions. Ubuntu now since 2013 I have absolute no experience with Win-CD-burn software.
Take care.
Fun fact : for two years straight, at the very end of the 90s, my father dragged my mother and I to see computers at the store. In 2001 he finally made his move and bought a top-notch Packard Bell desktop. Featuring the infamous Windows Me. I had a lot of fun learning to use it (Pinball 3D, love you forever), but as you said, it crashed constantly and the Restore feature quickly became the feature we used the most! We upgraded to Windows XP some time later, and it lived until 2006, when its motherboard fried up. And that, folks, is the story of a Packard Bell computer my family will never forget.
I remember Windows ME. When it crashed -- and it crashed often -- it didn't just crash. It crashed with prejudice, taking the filesystem along with it. I remember major disk corruption issues after a crash, many that required a re-install.
This. No crash without taking a few files with it, often quite important ones, which ruined the OS installation or at least the program you were using. It was horrendous.
The system restore was such a POS it was a lie as well.... "Restore failed." Okay well looks like I'm formating cause this POS bricked itself again.
re-installs was the goto solution of amateurs, i too used to re-install 98SE before i learned how to fix issues. The internet was just too full of bs advices on how to fix issues, we really thought re-install was a recommended practice.
@@pflaffik Re-installs were the quickest way to fix ME failures because the corruption not only deleted files, but often left open files in an unknown state. In a crash FAT32 couldn't update metadata reliably, so it was a potshot whether they were valid. Recovery solutions included copying files from another installation or from a (hopefully) recent backup. Of course there were issues with this, as ME stored files in dozens of locations and it wasn't a small install (relatively speaking, based on hard drive sizes of the day). In some cases, the OS could take up 10%-20% of typical hard drive space so a ready backup to existing disk wasn't always feasible. Yes, re-install was often the best option and was the Microsoft recommendation. (Yes, I was a PC support technician at this time.) 98SE was a different beast and didn't suffer the from the ME horrors.
I laughed out loud on that one. So true. I had to use ME at work and not only ran two external file back ups per day, I also operated the computer in a LITERAL STATE OF TERROR never knowing when the entire system would crash. I only used external drives to save anything.
I was going from Jr. High into high school and parents were buying a computer at the Gateway store. I remember standing in a sea of cowprint boxes. I knew about XP and I remember being at the store that day, specifically asking if our new computer was going to come with Windows xp. The salesman assured me that it would, but it came with Windows Me installed. It was just atrocious. I knew someone else with a Compaq (probably presario) and they had just as many stability problems. It's crazy that even on an oem designed machine, which extensively should have all the necessary drivers to function well, Windows me was still a mess.
But we used it until I went to college and bought my own laptop with XP.
Pre-SP2 XP is like a rare unicorn now.
Yikes!! I cannot imagine being promised XP and then getting ME.
That's like being promised a Corvette and then getting a FIAT.
Sorry you had to deal with that! 😂
@@nationsquid A FIAT is still loads better than a Windows Me PC. LOL
@@nationsquid dont you mean a Trabant?
so this is only my second video of yours to watch, but im very impresed. So I subbed and liked :D also, my mom still tries to get me to put windows ME on her computers. She adored it and doesnt understand its totally not usable today under normal situations
I called Windows ME 'Windows RE' for re-install.
Usually that meant reinstalling Win98 SE. ME was just a huge crashfest.
I never ran Windows Me because in February 2000, I actually won Windows 2000 from a drawing that was held on the Internet in October 1999. I couldn't believe it! It came straight from Microsoft in the store box. I loved that OS. For me, it was Microsoft's best operating system.
2000 and Windows Me. Meh.
I didn't like them. They were basically the same as 95 and 98, but ugly in my opinion. Despite having some upgraded features.
But I respect ya.
@@kootunesscrewy ya do know you could customize the ui right?
@@kootunesscrewy 2:29 Win2k is Microsoft’s best OS ever. Everything since has just been as good, and no better than Win2k. (it did everything it was supposed to do, every single time, and was rock solid stable.)
@@russ254 It's just my opinion, lol.
@@russ254 My opinion of Win7
Holy shit, when I was a kid a reletive died and left me with a Windows ME computer. I rmember talking about it like 5 years later and people told me "There's no such thing as Windows ME!!" I believed them and thought I was mistaking 98 or something.
Cut to a decade later and this video rocks my world.
I had a computer buddy back then that actually disassembled the Win ME kernal and added Real (or) Dos Mode back into it in order to run certain video games, and it actually worked really well. Thanks for the video.
I had a pretty good experience with ME, didn't understand what all the dissing was about at the time and was in no rush to move to XP. Was never any confusion between ME and Win 2000 either.
Windows 2000 is what windows ME SHOULD have been.
Exactly!
If there was an actual Home Edition of Windows 2000, XP probably wouldn't have been as popular or wouldn't have existed at all. History would have been entirely different.
yup I can see that I used windows 2000 up until 2011ish I'd say at that time it had just lost its support it was excellent very smooth and stable it was pretty much windows XP without the Luna theme
See my comment above. Windows 2000 would have been the next version of Windows for all users, but then the price of RAM went through the roof, so Microsoft suddenly called Win2K a "business" OS and rushed out Win Me for "home users". When RAM got cheap again, they tweaked Win2K slightly and released it under the name "Windows XP".
@@Thanos.m I had a Slot 1 Pentium III computer from February 2000 with 256MB of RAM, a 32MB Nvidia Riva TNT2, and 20GB hard drive, so XP was a no go on that computer. It originally came with 98SE, but I put 2000 Pro with SP4 on it in 2003 and held onto that computer as a secondary until 2007.
It was truly terrible. Crashed on me, reliably, every single day - something that hasn't happened since.
So that means nothing could have been a hardware defect, driver issue or PICNIC problem.
It has been the only Windows that didn't ever crash on me in two years :D
Nice video! I actually had more of a negative experience with Windows XP and Vista at first because they were shipped with computers that did not really meet their recommended system requirements; the computer my family had that ran Windows ME blazing fast totally tanked when we installed Windows XP on it.
I eventually grew to love Windows XP when it was patched with service packs and installed on a faster machine; unfortunately I can't say the same for Vista. I've pretty much always disliked Vista.
Same experience and also started liking xp since the service patches. By the SPs also winxp had more time released and by consequence more drivers being developed.
I knew I was lucky (Meanwhile everyone else cried in frustration) that my specific pc configuration was liked by winme and didn't had any major issues than reinstalling once every year
Minor nitpick: Windows Millennium Edition is actually pronounced Windows Me and not Windows M E.
It's weird, yes, but that's according to the official marketing.
Windows 10: Everyone gangsta till..... "AUTOMATIC UPDATE pops up"
I know this feeling all too well.
@@nationsquid :)
Me on a "metered" connection: Nope. :p
Me on a Mac, yeah mate
Lame joke
Using ME was an exercise in patience, and probably helped me be better at problem solving tech issues.
That's what I told myself about my first car to shield myself from the realization that I bought a lemon.
Honestly, I never had much trouble with ME, at least no more than with other versions of Windows. I think that if I hadn't skipped 98SE and been up enough on tech to use updated drivers, that may have changed my attitude. It was the same issue with Vista where it was mostly fine, once stable drivers became available.
I'd suggest that Windows 10 is worse than either ME or Vista as both of those could be booted in less than 5 minutes, whereas I don't get a working 10 log in under 10 minutes. I suppose, if I upgraded to an SSD, that might change it, but that's pretty poor.
Yeah, Windows ME was straight up broken. We were on Windows 95 for years and dad finally bought a new Dell that was loaded with ME, and that computer was nothing but trouble from the moment we booted it up. It held out for less than a year and eventually wouldn't even boot anymore. Then he bought a Compaq with XP and that stayed in use till after Windows 10 came out.
I’m a Mac through and through. But I’ve binged your Windows videos and find these little history lessons fascinating. I’m somehow nostalgic for something I never had (except XP, which I absolutely loved).
Hey it's Mac Os X
Not Mac Os 10
@@fargeeks actually tim cook always pronounced it os 10 🤓
@@olivia7546 I sure as hell never read such a term
It might feel nostalgic, specially because you missed the social factor of a shared experience with the majority. Only the shared experience was bs software thx to Ms, screams and headaches
My experience with ME was the worst of any OS I've used. In three instances, I had the OS become so unstable that I had to reinstall it. One time this was due to simply misclicking the hibernate button! As a high school kid before the age of cloud saves who couldn't afford a CD burner, it was extremely frustrating to lose all my files and data so many times.
The first thing I learned after my 98 SE first time crashed with prejudice was partitioning and never storing personal and system files in same location.
As an enthusiast I never mixed up between ME and 2000. But I DO remember installing 2000 Beta 3 over ME after a very short time because it was just that buggy. (I couldn't afford the full version of Win 2000 at the time).
Also fun fact: I mention the ME vs 2000 situation to my non-tech-enthusiast wife and her response was "those were 2 separate OS versions?". 😆
How the hell would you not confuse them as a non-tech person.
As a tech person you know:
2000 is decent
ME is a failed abortion
Did exactlythe same. ME was so biggy that i felt justified using Windows 2000 instead.
Stuck with it actually until Vista.
My grandmother’s computer had Windows ME and her computer caught the famous Volume Shadow Copy bug that began overwriting system files in the background and essentially eating itself up. I’m sure that was eventually fixed? Hard to say because ME had such a short shelf life.
I actually liked Windows ME back at the time. The issue I had with it was that the OS would detect different devices multiple times over multiple reboots and cause the dreaded blue screen of death. An easy fix was to go to device manager after a blue screen and remove all duplicate devices and reboot and the devices would only have the correct single listings and you wouldn't get any more blue screens until you rebooted enough times to get the duplicates back. An annoyance but other than that the OS was actually solid,
Windows 2000 was so freaking good though, probably my favorite Windows OS of all time. I miss the old basic GUI so much. :(
I second this, I liked using 2000 more than XP,.
2000 replaced NT4, not in the same segment as ME. What made win2000 possible for home users was compatibility with 98/ME, while NT4 was not.
Me too. It was sexy in its modest understated look.
Man, I remember being 8 years old and still somehow understanding that 2000 and ME was a very confusing marketing situation
Even nearly 23 years later, seeing ME again is enough to make my eye start twitching manically at the thought of an immediate blue screen of death, or spontaneously combusting device drivers, or unstable data connections….and so many more.
I worked for a school IT department at the time, and the local authority insisted on having ME, since they were refurbishing all the schools IT rooms, wanted it to look up to date and all that jazz. They didn’t want 98 cos “It’s older” and didn’t want 2000 because it was too expensive. Yeah, you can imagine how that went! As soon as XP appeared, we purged that disaster from the systems as fast as physically possible!
the only good thing that came from using Me was learning how useful it was to partition the C drive for software installs and keeping a separate partition for files I didn't want to lose in case of BSOD or something worse which would require a fresh OS install.
I remember the day I 'upgraded' my pc from 98 to me. I think it lasted all of a day on my setup as I was plagued with a painfully slow os, craploads of blue screens and the inability to run my dos games. This was followed by a reinstall on win98 🤪
funny, I was 7 years old and got a first computer. It was preinstalled with ME. At that time, I did not have the Internet yet, and I believed that the concept of an operating system on ME was the pinnacle of genius. I played Mortal Kombat 4, painted in paint, played pre-installed card games. There were no problems for me with this operating system since it was my very first one.
Same for me, ME had one big advantage over 98 - most of old HW worked without installing drivers, and that was really important in time when most of people didn't have internet. I remember hard times with Win 98 when it was crashing only because of bad drivers or something (people didn't have internet, so they were just randomly trying some random drivers with hope it will work), ME had same problem, but many things worked immediately after OS installation so there was less risk that you break it by installing some extra drivers. But this is valid for max 1999 HW, with newer, you needed install drivers, logically.
What’s with the Evan Olsen track? Was So Much Better included in ME or something? Crazy to catch that in the vid after that amazing Reply All episode a while back.
Interesting video! Thanks for posting! Yep! I bought a Sony Vaio in 2000 having Windows ME. It was pretty bad, boarderlining on disgusting. I recall early on having over 40 hackers logged on to my system. After it being trashed by a trojan, I promptly installed Windows 2000.
ah, the memories. just waiting for midtown madness 2 to crash again and again...
then, just a few years later, the quantum leap that was XP. hours of gaming without having to fear the constant crashing. sims 2, simcity 4, lego island (2)... i swear, those were the days.
I actually liked ME. I had used older hardware to build my computers, so it actually felt like an upgrade from 98se. When I went through 98 through XP, it really felt like a step inbetween. Eventually, I switched from windows to linux, and kept a windows partition with cygwin installed. However, I had a good experience with ME, and still believe it was a decent OS.
Man, I was able to install ME on a Pentium 60 with a VESA video card and a slow ass Seagate hard disk - sound was handled by an 8 bit Soundblaster, and the CDROM was a BTC unit. PURE SHIT. But it actually somehow did work.
I sold that thing in the classifieds...
@Alexander Ratisbona definitely the exception than the norm.
@@alexanderratisbona6614 Microsoft remove Real DOS-mode in order to make its OS more stable and faster to boot up. But regardless, you could still bring back Real DOS-mode to Windows ME, these patches exists long ago and still now by different user with more updated things. Windows ME use latest MS-DOS version, unlike 98 which is 7 version.
I liked WinMe's features, but it was a buggy mess. If you had a prebuilt with Me it seemed to fair better than a custom PC. I've seen a lot of computers run fine with Win98SE, 2000, and XP and crash and lock on WinMe.
@@the_kombinator I would expect VESA Video and a 8 Bit Blaster on a 386 or 486 but I have never seen a Pentium with it. That looks like a odd system all the way around. I didn't see many Pentium 60's in the day either come to think of it.
Windows: Mistake Editon
The only ME computer I ever had to deal with was my friends Compaq from Radioshack that had one of the first DVD players built in. Brand new he would need to usually reboot twice for the machine to recognize the drive. Was also the platform we used Napster on the most at the time. What a time it was.
I had used ME for a few times and yes, it's just a poor reskinned 9X OS, but with 2000 graphics. Nothing much of a good OS since I was more familiar at the time with XP which became an OS fondly remembered by a lot.
I think the *real* millennium edition would come out with XP the following year. My next video will be on Windows XP! So stay tuned for that! :)
I don't know how old you are and your experiences, but I can remember setting up networks and multiplayer games at private LAN parties with ~40 people and cobbled together PCs and "network infrastructure" ~20 years ago. Win 98 SE worked, XP worked, 2000 worked and then there is this shout across the room "... you there with ME, don't do anything ... stay out of the network, I 'll set that up ... " and then after 2 hours, much cursing, many beers, more blue screens, desperate searches through driver CDs and diskettes the 41th participant joined the LAN.
Fuck that shit!
Though in hindsight, the power delivery setup was even more adventurous. The building from the 1880s, last time the electrical system was probably touched in the late 1950s after the soviets had "exported" all excess copper left in east germany. 40 Socket A/Pentium 3/4 gaming PCs with horrible PSUs and an equal number of 15" to 21" CRT displays, using extensions up to 50m/150ft to distribute the load around the outlets and breakers.
A wonder that didn't end in a big camp fire with blue lights in the background.
2.5 mm2 aluminum will handle 16A without any problem if you have good connections.
I remember a friend had an HP desktop that shipped with windows me. And I was amazed how quickly it booted 'hybernate' i didn't know then
My first ever PC came with Windows ME. I remember that the look was more modern than the 98 we had in school. I honestly don't remember it being that bad of unstable, but I was a small kid using Paint and Print Art back then :)
I feel like having your creation called "ahead of its time" is a huge complement.
In the case with Windows Vista.
The first computer I ever used came with Windows ME. It took like 3 days until it bricked by natural causes and we had to "downgrade" it to Windows 98 because ME simply did not want to be installed again and crashed every single time during installation, right around 90%. Never used Millenium again after that.
i remember having an emachines with windows me on it. i tried installing halo on it as a kid, and the halo installation got it stuck in safe mode and no one could get it out.
In 2001 I joined an engineering firm as their software guy. My boss, and electrical engineer, kept referring to the newest edition of Windows as "Windows 2000 Me". He was actually referring to "2000" in the office, and "Me" in his home.
Something I never understood about older computers... What's the point of uploading different versions for home and business?
The facetious answer is to charge more for the business versions. The more serious answer is that Microsoft, having cornered the home and office markets, wanted to target the back-office market which used VMS and Unix for databases and the then new Web, and Novell Netware, Banyan Vines and others for network storage. Windows 2000 was the first real stable version of NT, allowing them to focus on making it fit for playing games.
The problem back then was that NT was relatively new and had much higher hardware requirements than 9X based (which in fact were pretty much just DOS with a GUI). Because of the much higher stability of NT it ended up being commonly used for business purposes while 9X was still used for consumer hardware. Until XP, NT-based systems also lacked compatibility to lots of consumer software which was mainly written for Windows 9X. Windows 2000 already attempted to break this gap but it wasn't until Windows XP where Microsoft was able to solve these issues and where hardware was also capable enough for NT. Windows Vista in fact had similar issues, just because it was ahead of it's time and lots of the hardware used in 2006 wasn't capable enough for it.
At the time it was about gaming and business work. Why would a gamer want a business OS and or why would businesses want a gaming OS? Microsoft got it 100% right by Windows 7
@@TRRDroid PERFECT BREAK DOWN.
The business version supports Active Domain which used to control every Windows settings/file sharing/policies by the organisation IT administrator.
Windows ME was the first OS my family computer had. My mom and I got it at a CompUSA and I was soooo stoked to be getting my first PC only to end up with that travesty of an OS 😭 Also this OS is what I had to train my old school Mexican mom how to use a computer for the first time since I learned that in school and my god was that torture with ME.
Shut up woman
I wonder the hell you had to go through to explain to her what BSODs were. La pantalla azul de la muerte.
@@lachinelli lol she would refer to it as la maldita pantalla azul 😂
@@Henradley I can't remember what my mother said when a BSOD struck, but it was hell. Luckily her newer computers have ran Windows 7 and 10 and BSODs are a distant nightmare in our memories.
@@lachinelli ohhh yeah mi mamá gave up on PCs after that and has stuck to iPad and her iPhone since those came out.
I cant stop watching you! You are an amazing channel!
0:56 Wait, are you talking about Windows ME, or Windows 11?
Because that description works extremely well for *both* of these.
I used ME and I thought it was fine, I knew what I was getting (Windows 98 3rd Edition) another 9x. Today I use a lot of 9x legacy programs and ME is my OS of choice. I am in my 50's now and I love the challenge that 9x OS gives me. 95, 98se and ME, just waiting to add 3.1 or 3.11.
Same here. Most people never really understood how Windows 9x and ME worked. It requires a lot of knowledge in terms of driver installation, IRQ's, BIOS settings, etc. to make them run smoothly, which most people don't have. They see a blue screen and they think the O.S. is crap.
He didn't even mention the native USB 2.0 support that ME had, which might seem insignificant today, but it was a great feature. Also, you can still play DOS games perfectly fine under Windows ME. Gaming in general is better in ME when compared to Windows 2000 for example. Like you said, it was a nice updated version of Windows 98SE but with a Windows 2000 theme.
Cant tell if you're trolling or not
Back then you were the same age as I am today :( unless you are trolling, then screw you
@@tyleyden8695 he isn't trolling but stuff old people do seems as if it is trolling, as it basically makes no sense if you were not alive back then. We are assuming you were not but who knows, I certainly was.
I can verify as an old person myself, that this is true. He likes the challenge, newer generations cannot bear a challenge lol they break down in tears at the mere thought of the challenge, that TJM uses to keep himself sharp.
It's a different mindset from a different time, back then we needed to be sharp and know how to solve new problems ... Todays lot have no interest in this as the OS's are barely configurable let alone accessible for proper troubleshooting!
@@Brunorego80 ME is still just a worse, buggier 98SE for the most part though. USB support is better out the box, sure, but DOS is much worse. It'll run most newer games, but as soon as you need full DOS mode you're basically screwed for no real reason. It's also slower, if not by a huge amount.
One feature I remember about Windows millennium Edition was the ever-present memory leak bug that seemingly never got patched
you are absolutely right, i just remembered that too. If you leave the computer on for the whole day it will be so slow you would be forced to restart to regain the ram speed again lol
The only fix for that was to install and run the program called RAMpage which would release RAM back to the system.
The major issue that caused ME to behave badly was drivers, since it dropped VxD drivers and the hardware manufacturers didn’t had enough time to test their wdm drivers.
Great videos. Another thing to point out is, because Microsoft charges for the software, most people did not upgrade unless they absolutely had to. We had Windows 98SE, my aunt bought a computer that had ME installed on it, but we never had it. I got XP on our next computer. So with the way Microsoft operates, the majority of people would just skip over many versions of software & only get some of the more important/longer lasting OS's. We had Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98SE, XP, Vista, Windows 10.
Everyone: "Windows Me is the worst Windows OS ever created!"
Windows 8: "Hold my beer"
I have defended Me. I have defended Vista. But I will never, ever, while I still have a bit of dignity and sanity left, defend Windows 8.
@@ragankelly9571 even Microsoft regrets it by releasing windows 8.1 one year later 😂
Exactly.
8.1 Are you seriously gonna forget me Oh wait in a way better editon
@@Stereocsx Yea, 8.1 at least fixed *some* of 8's issues, so it's not completely abhorrent
My first OS was Windows 2000 on a tablet. I recall upgrading the RAM to 512 MB and was amazed at the speed
What tablet was it?
baloney
Do you have any idea what you’re saying?
This was a home OS for my family for a long time up until it lost support and updates and by the end it felt okay compared to the first updates. Not great, but enough to work with. But we also weren't doing anything heavy with it
windows 10 had an issue where the sound would be mute for 5 seconds,whenever you play a video or audio file which irritaed me. now using windows 11, i don't have to put up with the sound issue i had on my previous laptop. also Windows Vista was my first time owning a laptop
When one of my Laptops ran Windows 8, I was stoked at about how bad it looked. The full sized start menu was a mess. Searching for stuff on the OS was also bad and I was happy when I got the upgrade to Windows 10 for free at the time. So yeah, I could say that Windows 8 was the worst OS I ever used.
I worked cable tech support and people called in constantly complaining about everything turning into boxes. Nobody seemed to like it
Windows 8 and 11 have been the worst OS for me. Windows 8 for the obvious reasons and Windows 11 for the amount of issues it has.
Win8 worked as well as win10 and used 20% of the ram. much better os than 10.
I think there is a difference between a stable OS with a bad UI and a straight up unstable OS. I think Windows 8 was fine, although its UI really wasn’t thought through.
I went from 7 to 10 on my first dell Inspiron I'm currently on my Third laptop
I grew up with windows me and it wasnt as bad as people paint it out to be.
I never got the chance to use the internet with it but as a child I didn't even know what the internet was so I cant speak for every feature.
I played many types of games without any issues and the only complaint I had was when the fan would start to sound like a jet engine.
Fair enough! Yes I have heard that a lot of people had issues on the hardware side of things when it came to running Me.
Wasn't as bad? It was a miracle if you could use it for more than one hour and not run on a BSOD.
@@lachinelli maybe I should get a lottery ticket. I never ran into a bsod.
My first experience of Windows ME was upgrading to it from Windows 98, only for it to tell me that it couldn't find a compatible driver for my modem - and would I like to go to Windows Update and download a new one? Needless to say, I reinstalled Windows 98 very promptly.
7:49 Piața Unirii 😂😂😂
Btw, great video!
My brother actually had a good experience with Me back in the day.
It had a good experience with you,but now with windows ME
He probably didn't tell you about needing to reformat every month and reinstall every driver. I remember that part lol. But for some reason I wasn't complaining.
Well, it was so bad that they had to replace it with XP only a year later, so I assume it sucked.
:(
😢
@@windowsme7532 you’re so self centered, Windows Me! Always “me me me!”. Why don’t you think about other people.
Windows XP is BiS tho
I think you misunderstood the video or something, they didn't "have to" replace it, XP was coming out either way. Microsoft just wanted to put out something quick while they were still working on what would become XP.
The first thing I saw when we unboxed our brand new Dell Dimension with Windows Me and turned it on was an error message. It was so bizarre, since we hadn’t even logged in to the computer yet. And it was downhill from there until Windows XP.
It was the first operating system I used at home on my own pc. As I was on dial up at that time, it probably meant that I never experienced that many problems. I don't remember ever getting a blue screen or having to do a restore etc. I didn't learn until much later that I was meant to hate it.
The best new Feature was that me supported plug and play mass storage devices. So you could just plug devices like usb sticks in it and it would install the driver automatically.
Now we're stuck with slow ass buggy MTP file transfer.
Really? in my case, if you did that, you were probably going to get a BSOD. Hell, I even got BSODs when idle.
i still remember that beautiful point where i got to install windows XP and i found out that it appearently wasnt the norm to get a bluescreen 2 or 3 times per play session and that a game crashing doesnt mean you always have to hard reboot.
XP really felt like the second coming of christ to 10 year old me
Had a Dell with Windows ME installed on it. Thing would literally forget how to work. I'd click on an internet link and nothing would happen. I'd click it again and again nothing would happen. I would have to hold down the enter key for like 5 minutes before it finally realized I wanted to go to that website. This was a regular occurrence.
There was also the constant updating. Automatic update might been seen as a convince now, but back then not so much. Combine the constant updating with a dial-up internet connection and it was annoying. One time had an update that took like 3-5 hours to do, then when I thought I was finally going to be able to actually use my computer, another update hit.
The worst thing I ever experienced by a long shot was VAX/VMS. The user interface was a peculiar kind of pain in every regard. The unfathomably bad keyboard of the terminal felt like a bonus on top of that.
Personally I didn't have any experience with Windows ME, so this video was an interesting topic to see. The most experiences I had was with Windows 95, 98/98SE, 2000 (through School), XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10 and for me, things were all okay, only annoyances I had were the confirmation pop-ups when you wanted to do something in Vista, but that's the only problem I had with it.
I remember playing games on my family’s computer running Windows 2000, I must’ve been like 4 years old. At some point the computer apparently broke and we didn’t have a computer for a long time
The next computer I used on regular bases was my dads laptop running Vista in 2007. I actually liked that OS.
I remember my computer back then was using Windows 2000 since my computer engineer cousin set it up for my family. I felt left out because all my friends were on Windows ME and I actually never knew it was bad until now. But it makes sense now since they all upgraded to XP immediately but 2000 worked great for us so I didn’t use XP until the mid 2000s. There was a lot of feeling left out for a good part of my adolescence when it came to computers because I had Windows 2000.
That is what led to Windows XP being the greatest O.S. and lasting over 7 years - even longer for people like me that hated Vista and refused to upgrade to it because it drained your computer's resources. I used XP for 10 years and loved it. XP was less than 700MB and had all you needed - can you believe an operating system less than 1GB. I had a stripped version that was only 279MB and I could still use it today without missing anything. XP was a special operating system that will never happen again.
Windows Me was the lost episode of Windows
The one that Microsoft doesn't want you to know about. 👀
All we need now is the hyper-realistic blood
Nice vid! You got right a lot of stuff. There's two things I'd like to add, though, that felt like they got lost to time. First: Windows Me started Microsoft's tradition of dressing non-critical errors in critical clothes. Before Windows Me, lots of blue screen errors were critical, meaning that if you reached a BSOD, you would have to reboot your system, but this wasn't the case with Windows Me. I would often point this out to people and see them shocked to find out that you just had to press Space and the computer would resume working as if nothing had happened.
Secondly, Windows XP SUCKED on release. It was super slow, still had no compatibility with DOS gam-err, applications, and was very unstable. When it came out and was also shit, my friends and I all went back to Windows 98, or stuck with Windows Me. A couple years later, a while after SP2's release, we finally upgraded. By then, Windows XP was about as good as Windows 98. Giving people enough time to get used to the system really is key, it seems.
I was there and I saw them dismissing and suffering, going back to 98 and now they are like rose colored glasses on XP as if it was an excellent OS day one :rolleyes:
I did waited for the SPs too. Windows ME ran great in my system and unexpectedly stable (Also knew it was an exception. Windows ME just liked my hardware config)
@@hnmAck as I often say, Windows Me was very fast, but mostly because nothing worked on it so it didn't ever get bloated.
Jokes aside, it was much faster than XP, at least as far as I recall. Felt like Windows 98 2 or something.
Another good video. FYI, it's not pronounced Windows "M-E" but Windows "Me" as in "It's all about me". That's not a minor point because when Microsoft called it "Me", it added to the confusion. At the time, I remember people asking what was this operating system's claim to fame. Why buy it instead of W2000? Oh, it's called "Me" implying that it's very user friendly in contrast to the professionalism of W2000 and will lead "me" into the new millennium, one BSOD at a time.
My parents had a computer when I was a teen in the early 00's that ran ME. I don't remember having issues with the system, but I was confused later when my dad got a computer from his work with 2000 and we got a newer computer with XP.
I thought ME was some kind of weird "special edition" OS or something because that one computer was the only place I ever saw or heard of it until years later.
Tbh, my family (my dad more specificly) introduced me to computer really easly: I was 4 and I remember windows 95 explorer.
Of course 98 was the next, but then we got 2000 cause dad knew Me was "useless junk" as he said
It came pre-installed on my 'e-machines' PC, the badge saying "Specially designed for Windows ME !".
I can honestly say I never had any problems with it. It wasn't until 20 years later that I discovered it was supposed to be $hit.
I used ME for a couple of years. It was fine and stable...no BSoD. Felt like a good improvement over 98.
My brother wasn't into computing, until i shared my Windows 98 PC on Xmas day, 1998. We surfed for three hours. He became interested and bought a second hand PC with Windows 95. He and I used AOL for dialup at this time. It needed to uninstall and reinstalled AOL several times. This was simpler to do this than fiddle with settings. He jumped to ME and it was unstable. He followed my advice and bought a DELL i5 PC.