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i had me and i had no problems with it but that was i supp-es i new how to work with it and the one thing i fond out with all windows what ever the box sed on memory double it
I don't blame you for accepting it you're just a small youtuber who need money but fuck raid shadow legends i'm tired of seeing their shitty game everywhere
I used ME for a good 5 years until I jumped ship and started using XP. Pretty quickly I jumped out off that boat and used Vista for so long I can't remember. I used it for so long I skipped clean over Windows 7 and jumped onboard Windows 8. Then 8.1 and then 10.. .
I remember buying a windows me PC from Tesco, it came with my first LCD screen too. Didn't have that many issues with mine compare to the day I got a vista laptop!
My experience was ME was positive initially. I'd heard mixed things about it back in the day, but I had the upgrade itch. I was running some older hardware that only had driver support for 98 and ME so that ruled out 2000 for me. I grabbed myself a copy and installed it from scratch onto my pc. I was really impressed, it felt like 98 but more modern (I suppose that's exactly what it was) I spent the next week slowly painfully copying my files from CD backups over to the machine. I kid you not, a day after I'd finally got ME exactly how I wanted it with all my files restored, one day I went to start my pc and it wouldn't boot. Would just bluescreen. I did nothing unusual the day before, shut it down as I would any other time but it never booted again. No idea why. Went back to 98 and stayed with 98 until xp came out and upgraded from 98 to xp. Never looked back. So although I want to stick up for ME, because while it worked, it was great, I can't because it decided to seemingly implode for no reason I'm aware of.
I worked at MSFT when Me came out. It was definitely called "me", but that was just marketing. I don't know anyone inside the company who called it anything other than Millennium. We didn't talk about much at all to be honest, though. We generally ran NT 4 and then Win2k rather than any of the 9xs.
duh, can you imagine the chaos if every employee had to face the blue screen of death a few times a day? I know yall popped in and ran 9x when Age of Empires came out... NT4 was rock stable if you found hardware with NT drivers. Windows 2000 was the stability of NT, with the GUI of 9x, and the terribly slow boot times of ME...and almost no manufacturers had released drivers for it when it came out and few ever did after, and I totally blame MS for that--so 2000 was great if you work for a company that orders 10,000 computers at a time and can dictate driver development--then MS cut off 2000 like a bad sore the day XP came out (in my opinion to force online activation nightmares...the medieval MS era from 2001 to 2015, when I spent my non-gaming time in Slackware)
@@Doing_Time Hard to tell your tone/intent from your text, but you are right about a few things: 9x stability was part of the issue, but in our case it had far more to do with our machines having to be in a domain rather than stability. While you can join 9x boxes to domains, they lacked some of the central management features that ITG (the IT department-- the "most feared and loathed group") want to employ. NT4 was my favorite OS ever until Windows 7 came out. (Win7 still holds that title). NT4 was very stable, but lacked plug-and-play support out of the box (though you could hack it in), not to mention USB. Both of these things became very important very quickly in the time between the NT4 and W2K releases. W2K boot time was *really* *really* bad, but Me boot times IME were pretty good. MSFT did drop both Me and 2k when XP was released, but if you think about it, consumer-friendly act in itself or not, no longer bifurcating the consumer and business markets with different products was the right answer. The mistake was really in releasing Me and 2K at all, not in placing focus on XP. Also, for what it's worth, very few rank-and-file people in the company (which decidedly included me) saw online activation in any more favorable light than consumers in general. I remember raging against it at work, as unpolitic as that definitely was. (I was young, and never very good at politics.) The "medieval era" as you put it, was really the Steve Ballmer era. Let's put the blame for that time where it belongs. Everything the company did was about fulfilling Steve's edict of protecting the Office and Windows kingdoms, and several of my projects were sh--canned as a result. It's notable that the stock price was flat for his entire tenure as well. Gates was a thousand times the visionary Ballmer ever was, and Nadella a thousand times the business man. (Sorry Steve!)
@@msthalamus2172 I agree with almost all of that...NT4 was there for me as long as all I wanted to do was code or type documents...multimedia in general and directx specifically was pathetic. 2000 was my favorite of all time (until windows 8/.1/10), but I grew to resent how MS made a mockery of those of us who bought 5 copies of 2000 pro the day it came out and then left us in the dust. XP fixed the boot times, but other than being better/longer supported I thought it was just a lot of eye candy additions. Vista introduced slow computing the likes of which hadn't been seen since floppy booting. They did fix the uac and validation issues a little bit by the last service pack, they refer to it as Windows 7. I can't say enough glowing things about directx, multimedia playback, virtualization, and driver support in windows 10...and I've only seen blue screens when hardware actually failed. I've changed out motherboards, GPUs, memory, etc. without any need to validate windows messages (in the medieval era, I actually had to re-validate for things like a USB wifi adapters and once a game pad...and online validation didn't always work so I'm on the phone to MS at 3am in the morning talking to someone about why I should be validated (eventually they got smart and automated the phone validation))
@@msthalamus2172 oops, didn't see your second comment until now. Well, the apple guys certainly liked to party... More of an Amiga man myself--how could stupid commodore screw that up? Ahh well, I prefer blackberries too... often the best products fail because it's all about image=Apple. I programmed an Apple IIe for a week and have never again been tempted to touch another Apple product...no backspace!?!?! I have to retype the entire line of code to get back to the typo!?!?! Ahhhhhh
Yep same, my girlfriend during that time in 03 had an HP that came preinstalled with ME, and was always having trouble it. after the 4th time doing a fresh install, I just went back to Windows 98 SE, and called it a day till I upgraded her to a newer machine I built myself with Windows XP on it.
Same here. Back in 2000 I've Installed it a couple of times in 2 days, and ended up restoring "ghosted" win98se back. I guess it depended on hardware. At that time I've had Celeron @400-500MHz and 64MB of RAM. The machine in this video is way more powerful than that, and I had about whart was a mid-range for that time... So maybe it just worked better on newer and better hardware.
@@robertosswald5896 Yes that was about mid range for sure, and it was not only the higher hardware needed to run ME proper, but the lack of ME drivers for the hardware, and people want to say well that was not MS fault, but in a way it was because MS was still using the 9X kernel, and failed to make ME fully compatible with 98/SE drivers of which most hardware up to that point had drivers for. MS was just a cluster F all around for so many.
@@CommodoreFan64 Exactly. Could be that Dan had luck with the fact that he had all the right drivers and powerful hardware so that's why it worked for him (the advantages of hindsight :) ).
The win 9.x line wasn't really based on DOS. It actually had it's own 32 bit kernel. It used DOS as a bootloader and then DOS handed over control to the 9.x kernal. DOS was kept running on the side for backwards compatbility. Which in some ways makes it a hybrid OS, but it's not like the first three versions of windows.
I've always suspected ME's reputation for being unstable being down to drivers. Drivers were something that came on a floppy or CD when you bought something. You had to be an enthusiast back then to even consider updating a driver from the net. That would explain why people who checks it out nowadays don't see the same issues. They'll usually get the latest compatible drivers,
I've always thought the same. On both real hardware and VMs, I've had way more luck with Windows Me being stable than I've ever had with Windows 98 (either edition). Definitely my preferred way to run Win9x things.
>Quote "That image of ME being the worst version only came along in recent years". For me it actually was the worst version. We have satirical memes like "your mouse cursor has moved. You must restart for changes to take effect" because of it.
@@10MARC Yep, it was considered absolutely buttock-clenchingly piss poor when it was new. I tested it out a few weeks after it was released, and I reinstalled 98SE very soon afterwards. :)
“My very good friends at...” makes me cringe. Unless you can post a photo of you sharing a social experience with the staff at xyz sponsor then please leave that line out.
Thanks for saying what I thought. It's absolute ok, if you get money from your sponsors. But just be honest about it. This whole "friends" thing with youtube sponsors is awful. He's certainly not the only Yotuber, who does it like that. I was about to stop the video and unsubscribe. Maybe i will next time.
The problem was ME came on a lot of very low end prebuilt machines, and they often did not bother to make ME specific device drivers for them, thus forcing Win 98/SE drivers to run under ME, which tended to cause all kind of problems, then the fact many of them did not come with enough ram to run ME proper. eMachines was one of the worst companies about doing this back in the day.
The issue here is that the hardware makers should be making the drivers. No OS should expect to need to do that. Most instabilities were driver related. That is not the fault of the OS.
@@0311Mushroom That is true, but in the case of ME, when the hardware you had did not have proper drivers, and it kept having issues it did make the OS unusable, so many times when I had to fix computers for others, and I knew there was Win 98SE drivers I just went back the 98SE, and called it day well at least before XP came out, and got out of it's early days.
I actually had no problems with Windows Me. I installed it on my parents' home computers, because it had System Restore and System File Protection, so that when things got messed up, I could help them get back to a working state quickly.
Lucky you!!!! I have never had windows 2000 or me because I literally didn't exist. My first windows was 7 but I have heard horror stories of it online.
Honestly, I like Windows ME, always have. Part of it might be at least in part, mostly the nostalgia factor since Windows ME was the very first Windows I ever used when my dad bought our very first PC back in 2000 (a Metron PC, powered by a 566MHz Celeron and 32 MB of SDRAM and a 6.5GB hard drive. I still have that machine and it still works), but truth is... We never had issues with ME for as long as we had it on our PC. We'd browse the web, make documents on Word, I'd play my games, etc. It always worked fine and quick. Maybe we were some of the "lucky ones" or just coincidence, but maybe there might be something to that theory that upgrading from 98 could have something to do with it, as ours was a native install. Regardless, despite all the hate it gets and recognizing that it does have flaws, Windows ME still has a place in my heart.
I have never really used Me as I jumped from a 98 PC straight to XP (which actually started in school for me) but I bought the installation discs from an earlier colleague of mine years ago so that I would have it in my collection. Back then mom got me a computer book with lots of pictures of PCs, operating systems and other stuff in it, looking at Me always made me think how cool it looks.
A few months before Windows XP came out, I bought a new Toshiba laptop with Windows ME. When it was running, it was just fine, but it crashed at least once a day. Shortly after this, XP came out and I had it dual-booting XP and Red Hat Linux, both were very stable and I used that laptop for years.
"It is I, Bonzi..I thank you for raising me from my grave. Allow me to make for you a memorable internet experience....." Ad Ad Ad Ad Ad Ad virus, permanent ie search redirect, malware, bsod... "There you are. You are welcome. "
I skipped Windows ME back in the day and went from 95 to XP. I've actually only used Windows ME in a virtual machine. Never had any issues with it, but not really disappointed that I passed this version by and went to XP. Windows XP is my 2nd favorite operating system after Windows 7.
I remember that in about 2006, I tried to make a networked file server using an old PC and Windows ME. I think it lasted about 3 weeks before it refused to boot - and then I installed Linux and it ran for 3 years!
Raid shadow legends, oh dear. Horrible predatory game thats designed around conning players into spending real money. Its barely a game, more a flashy slot machine. I guess Dan needs to pay bills but there must be a better and more relevant sponsor than that crap.
Great Video!!! I LOVE THE WINDOWS 9X BOOT THEMES!!! They take me back to a time when the computer was an exciting experience, not the everyday humdrum.
I really like your retro content - I'm still a big Amiga fan though I no longer own any Amiga hardware or software. Back in the day, here in the US, when Windows ME, Millenial Edition, came out, we always called it M-E, not me, but Microsoft marketing did start selling it that way shortly after its initial launch. It just makes me cringe whenever someone says, "Me" instead of M.E. And it is still a pretty bad operating system that did get better after much upgrading from Windows 2000/NT and went on to become an even better and more stable system i.e. Windows XT and Windows 7.
I don't think I ever used ME. I do remember using 98 on an old desktop though. I think my mom mentioned trying 2000 and not liking it though. I do remember XP though. I never owned a Vista machine myself but I did get a Windows 7 laptop as a birthday present in 2010. Sadly I nuked the hard drive on it in 2014, coincidentally around the time my mom gave me a Windows 8 laptop she had gotten the year before (she got a tablet and we have a couple spare MacBooks). I still have that old Windows 8 machine (though I later put Windows 10 and/or Linux on it) but I am getting a new laptop since she assumed I had already gotten one by now.
98 to XP to Win7 Beta. I was soo desperate to get rid of stock Windows Vista on my new powerful Laptop with Geforce Go7700 512mb. I resorted to daily driving Beta Windows 7 and it was still faster and more stable than Vista.
@@EpicB It was stock on the Asus A8JS 512mb VRAM version. A beast of a laptop yet it still got bogged down and strained under the buggyness of Vista. Win7 Release To Manufacturer was the first time it realy flew and showed me what it was capable of. Even Beta was a little buggy.
@@Neojhun Windows 7 was definitely one of the best Windows releases. I used Vista on at least one other person's computer but otherwise I never really got to experience it first hand.
When Windows ME came out, I purchased a new Dell notebook which came with ME. I plugged it into my home network, which by that time had about 8 or 9 computers on it. The notebook which was a fairly high end machine for the time, was so slow it took almost 2 minutes to open a one page MS Word document. After fighting with it for several days I discovered the issue. ME was trying to index everything on my network, which would have been somewhere around 500 gigabytes at that time. Once I figured how to turn off indexing, which was on by default, the problem went away. Shortly thereafter, I deleted ME and bought a copy of 98 for that machine.
I would say you got lucky, most if not all the stability issues were people like yourself who installed windows 98 drivers instead of the proper ME drivers. Sure they look like they work but one VXD or DLL mismatch and bang blue screen. I think the computer you used was over spec for the time too which probably helped.
Give the pc more than a GB of RAM ( for example 3x512 Mb sticks) and watch Windows ME constantly bug out when it falls into memory holes when using more than the one gig mark.
or run it on a lowend base emachines with a Celeron with 1mb of video ram for the onboard GPU, and a low 64 - 128MB of system RAM, and it was just as bad at causing all kind of system instability.
15:00 - This is wrong. Absolutely wrong! Windows 9x and ME does NOT emulate any part of DOS when you run a DOS application within windows. You are mixing this up with Windows NT's fake NTVDM which emulates almost everything which is just as good enough to emulate basic DOS applications, but not games. Windows 9x and ME runs DOS programs side-by-side and gives the DOS program DIRECT access to the hardware. The reason why DOS programs run better booting directly into DOS is because Windows still uses hardware such as the sound card, which cannot be released to the DOS application, and sound card manufacturers has to write drivers to "emulate" a sound card for the DOS application to see it as a usable device which will then pass it to Windows to play the sound. Other than drivers written for DOS emulation, NOTHING is emulated within Windows 9x/ME. Don't confuse the MS-DOS prompt with Windows NT's terrible NTVDM emulator. I was against Windows XP when it was released for this very reason.
I remember my grandma had an HP computer that came with Windows Me on it that I would use whenever I went to her house. I don't really remember it being as problematic as everyone says. Years later she bought another HP and that one had Vista on it. It was in the really early days of Vista, and it was 64-bit at that. THAT computer was a nightmare.
She probably made the mistake of buying one of those NetBust Celerons which were terrible and didn''t even run XP properly. I ran vista on a Core 2 Duo for 5 years and it was fine. Core 2 is the same basic architecture still used in intel CPUs today so Core 2 Duos and Quads still work pretty well for a basic Windows 10 PC even in 2022. Just don't expect to do much current gaming with them, though a Quad will run fortnite ok with a discrete GPU. Vista and 7 were/are great because you can run most XP era games and even a lot of Win95/98 games on them and you can't on any later version of Windows. I still have a PC running 7 for that purpose. I even ran Windows 10 on a late P4 with hyperthreading not too long ago from a SSD and it was pretty useable as long as you didn't open 6 apps and 23 browser tabs at once. But the Celerons based on them had a completely emasculated cache and would run at 100% just with light use even on XP. Basically just constantly shuffling data back and forth between cache, memory and storage because they usually had way too little of all of those.
Windows Me was more the Windows 'meh' uninspiring Stuff in it. But working for the Housewife and stable. I was fixing a lot of SE Machines where the User was the Problem, not Me. Vista had the Problem of the OEM. 512MB minimum Ram 800 Mhz CPU Clock. In a time when the Athlon XP 2000+ /Celeron 2000 with 1Gig or 2 Gig was the normal PC. The OEM had forced it on Microsoft for the Netbook, and 512MB on an XP Machine was already in its way out. My experience was on release on a decent PC (Said Athlon XP 2000+ and 1.5gig Ram): A little slower thanks to the bug with the small files. Vista SP1 when i sold my then Gaming PC 2007 (Athlon XP 3200+ with 3Gig of Ram and ATI X1650XT so a upper End 2006 Gaming PC): Vista SP1 was about 30% faster than Windows XP with Barton Core Mods etc. On my C2D Vista SP1 x64 was literally running Circles around XP. Had Dual boot for about 1 Month then i threw XP away. (it helped that i had a special Asus Vista Ready Motherboard with fast Ready Boost Flash installed, it reduced the small files Problem and cutt down the Boottime to 12 Seks WITH a HDD) So for Vista: Oem minimum PC worse, as Vista used twice as much Memory and CPU Time as XP. Decent 2000 Class PC with 1-2 Gig Ram here was the point of equilibrium. Especially after SP1 A faster PC with 3Gigs of Ram and a 3000 class or better Prozessor with modern Grafikscard: 30% faster in 32bit Mode. A 64 Bit Dualcore with 4 Gig of Ram about twice as fast. But Intel was still selling the Celeron D 2ghz especially the Celeron 310 without Intel 64 till 2007 with the lackluster 910-945 Chipsets. They had so many produced that they had to pair the Atom with them, to get them sold. And Calling a Celeron 310 on a 910 Chipset a 2000 Class Prozessor would be... a exaggeration. Of course those Systems only got 512MB of Ram and Vista.
I have Windows Millennium on a Pentium IV and I can tell you: 1. All ms-dos games that are not speed sensitive to CPU run perfectly. The best video cards for Ms-dos compatibility are the Fx series from GeForce, for sound you need an Aureal Vortex 2, Sound Blaster Live, Audigy 1 or to have a pentium IV motherboard with an ISA slot. 2. Windows Me does not blue screen when you remove the CD, usb stick or floppy while it is being read. 3. It has wireless keyboard and mouse support. 4. The location of a driver is saved. 5. The usb stick does not need a driver. 6. I do not recommend the VDM drivers because there is no longer support for sound in ms-dos, but with VDM you can use advanced stand by functions (suspend to ram). 7. Any usb joystick does not need driver. For Ms-Dos you need a joystick connected to the game port. 8. Windows Me is the most stable, I tested it after installing many programs and games without restarting and it didn't crash. 9. If I had to choose another retro operating system, it would be Windows 95 and in no case Windows 98.
Its funny. I ran ME for a solid 3-4 years back during that time and had very few issues. Sure there was the odd driver problem and whatnot but anyone that says they never had driver issues with xp or 98 is outright lying.
I installed it over Win 98 SE back in the day. Hated it. It crashed several times per day when playing commercial games. I reverted back to WIn 98 SE and had no more problems.
I did the same but I was stupid and carried on using the OS believing I could fix my way through issues and it would get better. It didn't get better. The most miserable computing time ever was had using that OS. Win2k was like a religious revelation coming back to a stable machine that could run for weeks without a reboot. It was glorious haha
Me wasn't that bad. I had more hassle with this is an illegal operation back in the 98 days which was annoying.Never really had any issues with Vista neither all depended on Memory back then. I would rather use Me over Windows 10 thats for sure!
Oh I cringed when you said that office 97 was still the current version of office... when it was actually Office 2000 (released at the same time as Windows ME)
With all due respect to Office 4.0 which had the best version of Word ever made, Office 97 was the best version of MS Office ever made....it was less feature rich but more stable than word perfect suite and better integrated and documented than star office. By 2000 a variety of office suites began to surpass MS Office in utility and appearance and corel found some stability before disappearing shortly not long after staroffice opensourced, leading to the open source office revolution and eventually to the superior open document formats and ushering in support for a variety of database management systems, and google started fidgeting around with free online office features while MS started coming up with weird subscription and online activation ideas before it finally sank into the ribbons abyss that only government employees and contractors now find themselves buried in...
Windows 98 was WORSE than Windows Millennium (aka ME) - if only for this: when a program crashed in Win98, the entire OS would crash a few second later. When a program crashed in WinME, Windows would keep on running (and would only hang during shutdown), I remember well. So, no, Windows ME was not the worst Version of Windows (Windows 11, anyone, LOL?) Same with Windows Vista, by the way (which, I admit, I have only had from 2012 on, so I have not known the countless problems (??) from the first years). To me, Vista was... the... well... "best" Windows version. Oh, Vista, where art thou?... I have decided I will not get that God-awful Windows 11 abomination.
I have never experienced disappointment from Windows Me coming from Windows 95. Played games and installed all my hardware drivers just fine. It’s a nice upgrade back then before upgrading to Windows Xp. I will never know why some nerds keeps whining about it since I skipped and never experienced 98 and 2K.
Like Vista, much of the rep is not deserved. When installed on a new machine it worked great. However, legacy support on marginal older systems was not great. I told people the same thing for both. If you are getting or building a new system, get it. But do not upgrade your older system to it.
Sorry. As a PC Builder for the past 25 years, Vista was crap. If you dropped about $3000 on RAM, a fast hard drive and a fast video card, you could make a tolerable machine. But for 85% of the machines it was sold on, it was garbage. It honestly felt like running on a machine about 1/3 the speed of what you owned
@@10MARC not sure what you ran it on then. My dual core 64 bit system was way faster than it was under XP. It ran circles around XP, and let me run 64 bit code also. As I stated, I bet you experience was with older single core 32 bit systems. 25 years, how nice. I already had that much before it came out, and have joked I should get "debug g=c800:5" tattooed on my arm.
@@0311Mushroom you hit the nail on the heads you had a nice dual core system probably with 8 or 16 gigs of RAM. Try running it on the common single core, 2 GB RAM systems that were affordable then. It was being bundled on systems it had no business even trying to boot on. Trust me. I was there selling and supporting machines then
@@10MARC and did I not say at the start it was great on current systems, but not on legacy ones? I would never suggest it on anything not 64 bit as a minimum. And told many to not upgrade because it provided them no benefit over XP.
Apparently vastly outnumbered, I actually liked "Me". At the time having progressed through the different versions of windows right from 3.0, it became my favourite version of windows. I used '98 for multiplayer Doom on Novell IPX networking but I generally preferred "Me". Even when XP came out, I didn't "like" it more than "Me", it was just the next in the line.
I don't think it's as bad as some say, haven't had any issues with it & if i have, were only rather minor. Was also the first OS i owned on my first PC back in 2002, don't remember all the specifications of it as i didn't look at that kind of thing back then. Had 64MB Ram a 2GB hard drive, standard beige box & the like you would've got then, still have the "Original" install CD that came with it, but the data rot has certainly gotten to it, though i keep it because it's one of the only things i have left of it. Is a copied disc, with the rbdc9 serial on it, that product key is everywhere on older windows OS'es. And the PC ran fine back then for me too. Haven't used any DOS type programs on ME, i have 95/98 machines for that if need be. Also have it on a Dell Latitude D600 & works good on there too, though it doesn't detect the DVD drive for whatever reason, so i use an external one when need be. Sure, can see why it wasn't much chop, everyone's experience with it was different would say, and in my case, has been fine. Back then on my first PC, and nowdays on the machines it is installed on.
It was ok with WHQL-signed drivers, but they made it too easy to install non-signed drivers, and the process to get WHQL certification too ornery. Because it was running drivers in Ring 0, it meant that a bad driver would cause a blue screen, and a whole lot of hardware manufacturers put out half-assed drivers. Sadly, XP still had the ability to be brought down by a bad driver, but they made it a lot harder to install non-signed drivers: wasn't until Vista that they introduced the ability to gracefully recover from a driver crash without bringing down the whole system. (I say this having switched to Windows 2000 the day they released SP4 with DirectX support...)
ME wasn't so bad...it had its own dialup winsock and supported netbios and ppp out of the box...that's more than could be said of most of the windows versions that came before it....it was just a major downgrade following the 9x line, the same way vista was a major downgrade following the nt5.x line--a boatload of unoptimized code and bloat piled in with an jumble of new ideas...
I don't know why all this hate. I used WinMe for about 2 years, I would call them "Win98 GT". So much faster than 98SE! And stable: The only BSOD I got, was when a friend of mine was using the PC.
Before Windows 10 I would have to say Windows ME was one of the worst commercially released OS's, but I think WIndows 10 takes the cake these days, and WIndows 10 was the OS that made me into a full time Manjaro Linux user.
Odd... you never mentioned that Microsoft officially back-ported features to Windows 98 SE. Which effectively made ME pointless, not once (XP), but twice.
I loved it! Why? Primarily for one reason. WinME gave us the point-in-time System Checkpoints and Restores! As one who liked to hack a lot on my computer that one feature saved my bunnies over and over again.
I remember when I was 8 years old and was using windows me back then,never had any problems with it....Same goes with vista and windows 7 or windows 8 and 8.1.The most problems I had was on windows xp and windows 10 I would say.
You're lucky if you weren't old enough to be using Vista as a corporate operating system at work. It's hands down the worst Windows ever released. I think many people spend at least the same time phoning the company's IT support than doing work. Even brand new machines just out of the box crashed in simple tasks like waking up from a screen saver.
@@blue_jm Vista RTM is really bad. SP1 was okay - my cousin has a descent HP PC running Vista and he never had a major issue. SP2 is as solid and stable as 7 RTM, but that was too late unfortunately. Similar as Me, most of the crashing issue is caused by outdated drivers, especially GPU.
I hear ya there, back in the 90's, and 00's I only put up with Windows because of games, and apps I needed to run, plus hardware support. Windows 10 on my main machine was the last straw for me when updates deleted folders off my main HDD, and where peaking my CPU at 100% load doing nothing but just sitting on the desktop about 2 years ago when everything else I had already moved onto Mint, and now Manjaro MATE. I'll take Linux, or even Chromium OS any day of the week. Hell I'll take the 13in Mid-2012 Macbook Pro I found at my local recycle drop off earlier this year running OSX Catalina over any Windows machine.
also! gee thanks now I'm gonna be binge watching your videos for quite a many hours! goodbye my daynight! these rule, thanks man. i knew I was in love with your content the second you mentioned GNU Hurd in your top 10 worst operating systems. i clapped! "bravo"
I think the problem with windows ME was kinda the same Vista: the average machines of the era Weren't not ready for it. Also having XP out so close to it just simply killed ot
Never had any problems with Windows Me during my use of it definately the clean install was the way to go with it and also installing the most current drivers certainly helped with stability everyone i installed it for at the time loved it.
I always felt ashamed to like Windows ME, it was fine for me and never played up. Preferred it over it's predecessors and dual booted my with XP Pro as I couldn't let go! Interestingly enough around 2002/03 I was playing Geoff Crammond's GP4 and was getting better FPS from my ME install over XP. Great nostalgia trip, thanks!
As for lack of drivers, that is the computer company's job, not Microsoft's. That's why so many computers would crash on it. Hardly anything to do with the stability of the OS itself, more so a lack of supported drivers. I have a Compaq Presario 5000 series that runs like a dream on ME, because it was designed for it. However it also runs like dogshit on win 98se with plus (which makes it about the same thing minus drivers), crashing a lot, freezing the most.
And with public perception, it's the same tale that would repeat with Vista. ME was a good OS, just like Vista was. Both were plagued by unfortunate timing and an unreceptive public due to mishaps created by Microsoft and others, and so when marketing went downhill, everything did. Revisit Vista sometime. Fully update it, maybe use it on an older HP COMPAQ 6000 PRO or something to a similar tune. Business machines of that time and a little later. I assure you it runs like a dream on the Core 2 Duo with even 4 gigs of ram.
Yep I bought that new back in the day, no system builder OEM, full price. I don't remember it being crap but I did go buy XP at full retail price shortly after
The main problem that appeared with ME was when it was an upgrade path from Win98SE which was a really stable OS (for the time). ME created so many driver conflicts and legacy software issues. As a standalone, fresh install, it was fairly ok. What also heaped on a number of issues was Freeserve - the release of THAT Freeserve CD caused so many issues. I had to reinstall so many OSes at the time. Just one word on the PC - seeing a celeron of that age sends shudders up my spine.
I must have used ME for about 5 years. I thought it was fine. I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be a dog til some friend was scoffing at it years into my use. And I did find Windows Restore to be helpful a few times.
My mate had Windows ME for sometime around 2005 or so. I remember indeed having to help him finding suitable drivers that wouldn't crash his system all the time. I think he reinstalled ME at least 2 or 3 times while he had it. I believe it also was missing some things I could do on XP at that time that weren't available for ME. I can't remember what those things were, I think it might have been regarding to some networking stuff.
I think the main issue with Windows ME is that it wasn't a Service Pack for 98, you had to pay for a new version. I actually preferred it to 98SE and 2K. XP obviously much better but I hated Windows 8 and would have preferred ME to Windows 8 any day. Thanks for the review Dan its a good nostalgic trip to that time.
I think this is the proper time to let Windows Me & Vista show its full potential, I'm now getting used to Windows Vista as it was so similar with Windows 7, stability & reliability, it performs very well if your PC is configured correctly. I hope one day, the hate for Windows Vista & Me will be gone soon
People forget what they do with their computer. Video editing, multitasking, running multimedia application, rapidly relaunching applications that physically access devices. They do this and blame the OS without understanding how it works.
Windows ME was so bad that it glitched out so much that I thought that _I_ was doing something wrong! I thought I was just really bad at computers and was somehow inadvertently messing things up.
Enjoyed your video of windows Me iv got an old desktop and look forward to trying Me for myself and I am glad you mentioned the Retrozilla browser iv been looking for a browser to work with old operating systems for quite a while and this will be really useful thanks
I am a computer Tech person and have been since windows 3.1 and I loved Vista and Windows ME over XP and Windows 98.... Most people at that time had budget computers like HP that could barely run what came pre-installed, and some were built for win95 that had been upgraded to win98 and then again to winME and they simply didn't have what it takes to run ME efficiently so people blamed the OS instead of there PC's, by XP time most people had replaced there PC with a new XP budget PCs and ended up hating Vista for pretty much the same reasons as winME. Budget machines poorly running the OS.
For me it's not worst at all😉😉, the only Problem in "Windows Me" was it's "Slow Keyboard Function" then we found out that when we "Upgrade" from "Windows 98SE" to "Windows Millennium" that the "Tweak" is "Adjust" the "Keyboard Speed" on "Control Panel"..👍👍😎
I love Linux, and run Manjaro MATE on all my main systems, and my first experience was RedHat 386 back in the mid 90's along with Corel Linux but at the time as an AMD fan, and a gamer I had to go back to Windows sadly. I'm so glad AMD finally got their stuff together for Linux, codes good open source drivers.
Excellent video as always Dan! What model of Pentium 4 is in your Windows 98 PC? I love Windows 98 and use Pentium II PCs are pretty expensive here in the USA.
I went through the 95 , 98, 98SE and ME in period, as well as trying NT4.0, Win2K and eventually going full time NT Kernel with Windows XP. I remember being really excited about XP when it was launched I was at college. But in hind sight I think 98SE serves the best position for Retro Gaming PC's as you can run everything on it. But I definitely used ME for quite some time and really enjoyed it in period. I'd use it today albeit the DOS mode of Win98SE takes the biscuit 🍪
I have used Windows Me back in the days and was rock-solid for me. It even sound better due to drivers on my Yamaha OPL3-SAX sound card with better bass and treble than on Windows 2000 which had the sound muffled and kinda metal-ish treble. I remember that I had a TV tuner which had crisp and better display of TV channels than on Windows 2000 which displayed the cannels more blurry.
I would not sell Windows ME back then. I think of the hundreds of machines we sold in 2000 - 2001 we maybe built about 10 with Windows ME. I recall the common PC speeds for an economical system being 450 - 750 MHz back then with 1 GHz machines being the high end. Windows ME was quite slow on those machines... We also knew it was a "Band Aid" OS before their real 32 bit OS would be shipping. In short, my home users got Windows 98SE and business users got the very nice Windows 2000.
ran my studio in 2000-2002 on it on a custom built PIII 1Ghz, 1Gb ram, Matrox Millenium G400 with Yamaha DS2416 soundcard and AW44 expansion running Logic 5.5. was one of the most stable and responsive systems i ever used. switch to the mac in late 2002 when apple bought Emagic and it took many years to get a replacement as solid.
I grabbed a copy off the shelf from my local pc hardware shop on release. I couldn't believe a legit copy of Windows was only £30. I found out why when my windmodem refused to work after ME was installed. It helpfully offered to go online to find a working driver. :-)
I used Windows Me back in the day and I had no negative experiences with it. I think people just blamed it when they installed bad drivers or got viruses.
I never had ME but my mate did and I don't remember there being any problems with it. I agree, people were also much less tech savvy in general back then and also I think in some cases hardware of that period didn't always play nicely. Rarely does an OS work perfectly on the generation of hardware it releases with, it only truly comes into its own a few years later once everything has been throughly tested and optimized.
Windows ME was regarded as ”not worth it/ not that good” back when released by most users as I remember it. You will always find positive or negative reviews if you look for them. But win me is not as bad as most say.
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i had me and i had no problems with it but that was i supp-es i new how to work with it and the one thing i fond out with all windows what ever the box sed on memory double it
Yeah, definitely not installing that garbage. You gotta do what you've gotta do though.
I don't blame you for accepting it you're just a small youtuber who need money but fuck raid shadow legends i'm tired of seeing their shitty game everywhere
I used ME for a good 5 years until I jumped ship and started using XP. Pretty quickly I jumped out off that boat and used Vista for so long I can't remember. I used it for so long I skipped clean over Windows 7 and jumped onboard Windows 8. Then 8.1 and then 10.. .
I remember buying a windows me PC from Tesco, it came with my first LCD screen too. Didn't have that many issues with mine compare to the day I got a vista laptop!
My experience was ME was positive initially. I'd heard mixed things about it back in the day, but I had the upgrade itch. I was running some older hardware that only had driver support for 98 and ME so that ruled out 2000 for me. I grabbed myself a copy and installed it from scratch onto my pc. I was really impressed, it felt like 98 but more modern (I suppose that's exactly what it was) I spent the next week slowly painfully copying my files from CD backups over to the machine. I kid you not, a day after I'd finally got ME exactly how I wanted it with all my files restored, one day I went to start my pc and it wouldn't boot. Would just bluescreen. I did nothing unusual the day before, shut it down as I would any other time but it never booted again. No idea why. Went back to 98 and stayed with 98 until xp came out and upgraded from 98 to xp. Never looked back. So although I want to stick up for ME, because while it worked, it was great, I can't because it decided to seemingly implode for no reason I'm aware of.
Windows ME is actually good =
I worked at MSFT when Me came out. It was definitely called "me", but that was just marketing. I don't know anyone inside the company who called it anything other than Millennium. We didn't talk about much at all to be honest, though. We generally ran NT 4 and then Win2k rather than any of the 9xs.
duh, can you imagine the chaos if every employee had to face the blue screen of death a few times a day? I know yall popped in and ran 9x when Age of Empires came out...
NT4 was rock stable if you found hardware with NT drivers. Windows 2000 was the stability of NT, with the GUI of 9x, and the terribly slow boot times of ME...and almost no manufacturers had released drivers for it when it came out and few ever did after, and I totally blame MS for that--so 2000 was great if you work for a company that orders 10,000 computers at a time and can dictate driver development--then MS cut off 2000 like a bad sore the day XP came out (in my opinion to force online activation nightmares...the medieval MS era from 2001 to 2015, when I spent my non-gaming time in Slackware)
@@Doing_Time Hard to tell your tone/intent from your text, but you are right about a few things: 9x stability was part of the issue, but in our case it had far more to do with our machines having to be in a domain rather than stability. While you can join 9x boxes to domains, they lacked some of the central management features that ITG (the IT department-- the "most feared and loathed group") want to employ. NT4 was my favorite OS ever until Windows 7 came out. (Win7 still holds that title). NT4 was very stable, but lacked plug-and-play support out of the box (though you could hack it in), not to mention USB. Both of these things became very important very quickly in the time between the NT4 and W2K releases. W2K boot time was *really* *really* bad, but Me boot times IME were pretty good. MSFT did drop both Me and 2k when XP was released, but if you think about it, consumer-friendly act in itself or not, no longer bifurcating the consumer and business markets with different products was the right answer. The mistake was really in releasing Me and 2K at all, not in placing focus on XP. Also, for what it's worth, very few rank-and-file people in the company (which decidedly included me) saw online activation in any more favorable light than consumers in general. I remember raging against it at work, as unpolitic as that definitely was. (I was young, and never very good at politics.) The "medieval era" as you put it, was really the Steve Ballmer era. Let's put the blame for that time where it belongs. Everything the company did was about fulfilling Steve's edict of protecting the Office and Windows kingdoms, and several of my projects were sh--canned as a result. It's notable that the stock price was flat for his entire tenure as well. Gates was a thousand times the visionary Ballmer ever was, and Nadella a thousand times the business man. (Sorry Steve!)
And Jobs was a million times the visionary Gates was, and Woz a billion times the engineer of all four of these other names-- combined! :D
@@msthalamus2172 I agree with almost all of that...NT4 was there for me as long as all I wanted to do was code or type documents...multimedia in general and directx specifically was pathetic. 2000 was my favorite of all time (until windows 8/.1/10), but I grew to resent how MS made a mockery of those of us who bought 5 copies of 2000 pro the day it came out and then left us in the dust. XP fixed the boot times, but other than being better/longer supported I thought it was just a lot of eye candy additions. Vista introduced slow computing the likes of which hadn't been seen since floppy booting. They did fix the uac and validation issues a little bit by the last service pack, they refer to it as Windows 7. I can't say enough glowing things about directx, multimedia playback, virtualization, and driver support in windows 10...and I've only seen blue screens when hardware actually failed. I've changed out motherboards, GPUs, memory, etc. without any need to validate windows messages (in the medieval era, I actually had to re-validate for things like a USB wifi adapters and once a game pad...and online validation didn't always work so I'm on the phone to MS at 3am in the morning talking to someone about why I should be validated (eventually they got smart and automated the phone validation))
@@msthalamus2172 oops, didn't see your second comment until now. Well, the apple guys certainly liked to party... More of an Amiga man myself--how could stupid commodore screw that up? Ahh well, I prefer blackberries too... often the best products fail because it's all about image=Apple. I programmed an Apple IIe for a week and have never again been tempted to touch another Apple product...no backspace!?!?! I have to retype the entire line of code to get back to the typo!?!?! Ahhhhhh
You were lucky - in 2000 I spent two whole days trying to get that abortion to install before giving up completely.
Yep same, my girlfriend during that time in 03 had an HP that came preinstalled with ME, and was always having trouble it. after the 4th time doing a fresh install, I just went back to Windows 98 SE, and called it a day till I upgraded her to a newer machine I built myself with Windows XP on it.
Same here. Back in 2000 I've Installed it a couple of times in 2 days, and ended up restoring "ghosted" win98se back. I guess it depended on hardware. At that time I've had Celeron @400-500MHz and 64MB of RAM. The machine in this video is way more powerful than that, and I had about whart was a mid-range for that time... So maybe it just worked better on newer and better hardware.
@@robertosswald5896 Yes that was about mid range for sure, and it was not only the higher hardware needed to run ME proper, but the lack of ME drivers for the hardware, and people want to say well that was not MS fault, but in a way it was because MS was still using the 9X kernel, and failed to make ME fully compatible with 98/SE drivers of which most hardware up to that point had drivers for. MS was just a cluster F all around for so many.
@@CommodoreFan64 Exactly. Could be that Dan had luck with the fact that he had all the right drivers and powerful hardware so that's why it worked for him (the advantages of hindsight :) ).
I just pirated Windows 2000
The win 9.x line wasn't really based on DOS. It actually had it's own 32 bit kernel. It used DOS as a bootloader and then DOS handed over control to the 9.x kernal. DOS was kept running on the side for backwards compatbility. Which in some ways makes it a hybrid OS, but it's not like the first three versions of windows.
I've always suspected ME's reputation for being unstable being down to drivers. Drivers were something that came on a floppy or CD when you bought something. You had to be an enthusiast back then to even consider updating a driver from the net.
That would explain why people who checks it out nowadays don't see the same issues. They'll usually get the latest compatible drivers,
I've always thought the same. On both real hardware and VMs, I've had way more luck with Windows Me being stable than I've ever had with Windows 98 (either edition). Definitely my preferred way to run Win9x things.
My parents bought it for me when I was child in 2000. Still was better than 98 at least when it came to play games
I can confirm. If you tried running Windows 98SE and ME on a WDM-only driver setup, Windows ME will win. 98SE is just ultra buggy with WDMs.
>Quote "That image of ME being the worst version only came along in recent years".
For me it actually was the worst version.
We have satirical memes like "your mouse cursor has moved. You must restart for changes to take effect" because of it.
I agree. We were all laughing at Windows ME back in 2000, too
@@10MARC Yep, it was considered absolutely buttock-clenchingly piss poor when it was new. I tested it out a few weeks after it was released, and I reinstalled 98SE very soon afterwards. :)
Didn't remember those jokes - it does describe my (limited) experience with it though =)
Wish we could go back to the 3D look of previous Windows versions. Windows 10 is soulless.
“My very good friends at...” makes me cringe. Unless you can post a photo of you sharing a social experience with the staff at xyz sponsor then please leave that line out.
Thanks for saying what I thought. It's absolute ok, if you get money from your sponsors. But just be honest about it. This whole "friends" thing with youtube sponsors is awful. He's certainly not the only Yotuber, who does it like that. I was about to stop the video and unsubscribe. Maybe i will next time.
I see nothing wrong with it.
Really dan, raid shadow shilling
Man's gotta eat
I used ME for awhile before XP and never had any real issues that I can remember... maybe ATI driver issues?
It had some issues with certain drivers, but the OS itself wasn't that bad and many users would have a nice experience
The problem was ME came on a lot of very low end prebuilt machines, and they often did not bother to make ME specific device drivers for them, thus forcing Win 98/SE drivers to run under ME, which tended to cause all kind of problems, then the fact many of them did not come with enough ram to run ME proper. eMachines was one of the worst companies about doing this back in the day.
The issue here is that the hardware makers should be making the drivers. No OS should expect to need to do that.
Most instabilities were driver related. That is not the fault of the OS.
@@0311Mushroom That is true, but in the case of ME, when the hardware you had did not have proper drivers, and it kept having issues it did make the OS unusable, so many times when I had to fix computers for others, and I knew there was Win 98SE drivers I just went back the 98SE, and called it day well at least before XP came out, and got out of it's early days.
@@CommodoreFan64 once again, the fault with the hardware makers, not the OS itself.
Windows ME remains the only OS I've ever downgraded from. I'm sure it ran perfectly fine for a lot of people but on my system it didn't.
I actually had no problems with Windows Me. I installed it on my parents' home computers, because it had System Restore and System File Protection, so that when things got messed up, I could help them get back to a working state quickly.
same!
Lucky you!!!!
I have never had windows 2000 or me because I literally didn't exist.
My first windows was 7 but I have heard horror stories of it online.
Honestly, I like Windows ME, always have. Part of it might be at least in part, mostly the nostalgia factor since Windows ME was the very first Windows I ever used when my dad bought our very first PC back in 2000 (a Metron PC, powered by a 566MHz Celeron and 32 MB of SDRAM and a 6.5GB hard drive. I still have that machine and it still works), but truth is... We never had issues with ME for as long as we had it on our PC. We'd browse the web, make documents on Word, I'd play my games, etc. It always worked fine and quick. Maybe we were some of the "lucky ones" or just coincidence, but maybe there might be something to that theory that upgrading from 98 could have something to do with it, as ours was a native install. Regardless, despite all the hate it gets and recognizing that it does have flaws, Windows ME still has a place in my heart.
I have never really used Me as I jumped from a 98 PC straight to XP (which actually started in school for me) but I bought the installation discs from an earlier colleague of mine years ago so that I would have it in my collection.
Back then mom got me a computer book with lots of pictures of PCs, operating systems and other stuff in it, looking at Me always made me think how cool it looks.
A few months before Windows XP came out, I bought a new Toshiba laptop with Windows ME. When it was running, it was just fine, but it crashed at least once a day. Shortly after this, XP came out and I had it dual-booting XP and Red Hat Linux, both were very stable and I used that laptop for years.
nice
CLIPPY!!!! He and Bonzai Buddy :)
Used it back in the day and got rid of it real fast.
"It is I, Bonzi..I thank you for raising me from my grave. Allow me to make for you a memorable internet experience....."
Ad Ad Ad Ad Ad Ad virus, permanent ie search redirect, malware, bsod...
"There you are. You are welcome. "
@@devil8975 Hahaha so true :)
I had ME and it seemed o.k to me, excuse the pun.
I skipped Windows ME back in the day and went from 95 to XP. I've actually only used Windows ME in a virtual machine. Never had any issues with it, but not really disappointed that I passed this version by and went to XP. Windows XP is my 2nd favorite operating system after Windows 7.
I remember that in about 2006, I tried to make a networked file server using an old PC and Windows ME. I think it lasted about 3 weeks before it refused to boot - and then I installed Linux and it ran for 3 years!
Raid shadow legends, oh dear. Horrible predatory game thats designed around conning players into spending real money. Its barely a game, more a flashy slot machine. I guess Dan needs to pay bills but there must be a better and more relevant sponsor than that crap.
Great Video!!! I LOVE THE WINDOWS 9X BOOT THEMES!!! They take me back to a time when the computer was an exciting experience, not the everyday humdrum.
I really like your retro content - I'm still a big Amiga fan though I no longer own any Amiga hardware or software. Back in the day, here in the US, when Windows ME, Millenial Edition, came out, we always called it M-E, not me, but Microsoft marketing did start selling it that way shortly after its initial launch. It just makes me cringe whenever someone says, "Me" instead of M.E. And it is still a pretty bad operating system that did get better after much upgrading from Windows 2000/NT and went on to become an even better and more stable system i.e. Windows XT and Windows 7.
OH BOI, The rollecoaster that was ME! My personal Choice was 2000 Pro, until windows 7 came out. I did have a laptop with XP aswell :D
I don't think I ever used ME. I do remember using 98 on an old desktop though. I think my mom mentioned trying 2000 and not liking it though. I do remember XP though. I never owned a Vista machine myself but I did get a Windows 7 laptop as a birthday present in 2010. Sadly I nuked the hard drive on it in 2014, coincidentally around the time my mom gave me a Windows 8 laptop she had gotten the year before (she got a tablet and we have a couple spare MacBooks). I still have that old Windows 8 machine (though I later put Windows 10 and/or Linux on it) but I am getting a new laptop since she assumed I had already gotten one by now.
98 to XP to Win7 Beta. I was soo desperate to get rid of stock Windows Vista on my new powerful Laptop with Geforce Go7700 512mb. I resorted to daily driving Beta Windows 7 and it was still faster and more stable than Vista.
@@Neojhun Thankfully I got to skip over Vista.
@@EpicB It was stock on the Asus A8JS 512mb VRAM version. A beast of a laptop yet it still got bogged down and strained under the buggyness of Vista. Win7 Release To Manufacturer was the first time it realy flew and showed me what it was capable of. Even Beta was a little buggy.
@@Neojhun Windows 7 was definitely one of the best Windows releases. I used Vista on at least one other person's computer but otherwise I never really got to experience it first hand.
I worked in the tech department of a PC World during ME - ughhh dark days :)
When Windows ME came out, I purchased a new Dell notebook which came with ME. I plugged it into my home network, which by that time had about 8 or 9 computers on it. The notebook which was a fairly high end machine for the time, was so slow it took almost 2 minutes to open a one page MS Word document. After fighting with it for several days I discovered the issue. ME was trying to index everything on my network, which would have been somewhere around 500 gigabytes at that time. Once I figured how to turn off indexing, which was on by default, the problem went away. Shortly thereafter, I deleted ME and bought a copy of 98 for that machine.
I would say you got lucky, most if not all the stability issues were people like yourself who installed windows 98 drivers instead of the proper ME drivers. Sure they look like they work but one VXD or DLL mismatch and bang blue screen. I think the computer you used was over spec for the time too which probably helped.
Give the pc more than a GB of RAM ( for example 3x512 Mb sticks) and watch Windows ME constantly bug out when it falls into memory holes when using more than the one gig mark.
or run it on a lowend base emachines with a Celeron with 1mb of video ram for the onboard GPU, and a low 64 - 128MB of system RAM, and it was just as bad at causing all kind of system instability.
15:00 - This is wrong. Absolutely wrong! Windows 9x and ME does NOT emulate any part of DOS when you run a DOS application within windows. You are mixing this up with Windows NT's fake NTVDM which emulates almost everything which is just as good enough to emulate basic DOS applications, but not games. Windows 9x and ME runs DOS programs side-by-side and gives the DOS program DIRECT access to the hardware. The reason why DOS programs run better booting directly into DOS is because Windows still uses hardware such as the sound card, which cannot be released to the DOS application, and sound card manufacturers has to write drivers to "emulate" a sound card for the DOS application to see it as a usable device which will then pass it to Windows to play the sound. Other than drivers written for DOS emulation, NOTHING is emulated within Windows 9x/ME. Don't confuse the MS-DOS prompt with Windows NT's terrible NTVDM emulator. I was against Windows XP when it was released for this very reason.
I remember my grandma had an HP computer that came with Windows Me on it that I would use whenever I went to her house. I don't really remember it being as problematic as everyone says.
Years later she bought another HP and that one had Vista on it. It was in the really early days of Vista, and it was 64-bit at that. THAT computer was a nightmare.
She probably made the mistake of buying one of those NetBust Celerons which were terrible and didn''t even run XP properly. I ran vista on a Core 2 Duo for 5 years and it was fine. Core 2 is the same basic architecture still used in intel CPUs today so Core 2 Duos and Quads still work pretty well for a basic Windows 10 PC even in 2022. Just don't expect to do much current gaming with them, though a Quad will run fortnite ok with a discrete GPU. Vista and 7 were/are great because you can run most XP era games and even a lot of Win95/98 games on them and you can't on any later version of Windows. I still have a PC running 7 for that purpose. I even ran Windows 10 on a late P4 with hyperthreading not too long ago from a SSD and it was pretty useable as long as you didn't open 6 apps and 23 browser tabs at once. But the Celerons based on them had a completely emasculated cache and would run at 100% just with light use even on XP. Basically just constantly shuffling data back and forth between cache, memory and storage because they usually had way too little of all of those.
Windows Me was more the Windows 'meh' uninspiring Stuff in it. But working for the Housewife and stable. I was fixing a lot of SE Machines where the User was the Problem, not Me.
Vista had the Problem of the OEM. 512MB minimum Ram 800 Mhz CPU Clock. In a time when the Athlon XP 2000+ /Celeron 2000 with 1Gig or 2 Gig was the normal PC.
The OEM had forced it on Microsoft for the Netbook, and 512MB on an XP Machine was already in its way out.
My experience was on release on a decent PC (Said Athlon XP 2000+ and 1.5gig Ram): A little slower thanks to the bug with the small files.
Vista SP1 when i sold my then Gaming PC 2007 (Athlon XP 3200+ with 3Gig of Ram and ATI X1650XT so a upper End 2006 Gaming PC): Vista SP1 was about 30% faster than Windows XP with Barton Core Mods etc.
On my C2D Vista SP1 x64 was literally running Circles around XP. Had Dual boot for about 1 Month then i threw XP away.
(it helped that i had a special Asus Vista Ready Motherboard with fast Ready Boost Flash installed, it reduced the small files Problem and cutt down the Boottime to 12 Seks WITH a HDD)
So for Vista:
Oem minimum PC worse, as Vista used twice as much Memory and CPU Time as XP.
Decent 2000 Class PC with 1-2 Gig Ram here was the point of equilibrium. Especially after SP1
A faster PC with 3Gigs of Ram and a 3000 class or better Prozessor with modern Grafikscard: 30% faster in 32bit Mode.
A 64 Bit Dualcore with 4 Gig of Ram about twice as fast.
But Intel was still selling the Celeron D 2ghz especially the Celeron 310 without Intel 64 till 2007 with the lackluster 910-945 Chipsets. They had so many produced that they had to pair the Atom with them, to get them sold. And Calling a Celeron 310 on a 910 Chipset a 2000 Class Prozessor would be... a exaggeration. Of course those Systems only got 512MB of Ram and Vista.
Windows ME should of just been a service pack for Windows 98SE
No it added tons of new features
@@stanleybowman-hood6194 SP's have added features before, like 98 SE and XP SP2
I have Windows Millennium on a Pentium IV and I can tell you:
1. All ms-dos games that are not speed sensitive to CPU run perfectly. The best video cards for Ms-dos compatibility are the Fx series from GeForce, for sound you need an Aureal Vortex 2, Sound Blaster Live, Audigy 1 or to have a pentium IV motherboard with an ISA slot.
2. Windows Me does not blue screen when you remove the CD, usb stick or floppy while it is being read.
3. It has wireless keyboard and mouse support.
4. The location of a driver is saved.
5. The usb stick does not need a driver.
6. I do not recommend the VDM drivers because there is no longer support for sound in ms-dos, but with VDM you can use advanced stand by functions (suspend to ram).
7. Any usb joystick does not need driver. For Ms-Dos you need a joystick connected to the game port.
8. Windows Me is the most stable, I tested it after installing many programs and games without restarting and it didn't crash.
9. If I had to choose another retro operating system, it would be Windows 95 and in no case Windows 98.
Its funny. I ran ME for a solid 3-4 years back during that time and had very few issues. Sure there was the odd driver problem and whatnot but anyone that says they never had driver issues with xp or 98 is outright lying.
I installed it over Win 98 SE back in the day. Hated it. It crashed several times per day when playing commercial games. I reverted back to WIn 98 SE and had no more problems.
I did the same but I was stupid and carried on using the OS believing I could fix my way through issues and it would get better. It didn't get better. The most miserable computing time ever was had using that OS. Win2k was like a religious revelation coming back to a stable machine that could run for weeks without a reboot. It was glorious haha
Me wasn't that bad. I had more hassle with this is an illegal operation back in the 98 days which was annoying.Never really had any issues with Vista neither all depended on Memory back then. I would rather use Me over Windows 10 thats for sure!
Oh I cringed when you said that office 97 was still the current version of office... when it was actually Office 2000 (released at the same time as Windows ME)
Office 2000 was relased in 1999 (pretty much alongside Windows 98 SE)
With all due respect to Office 4.0 which had the best version of Word ever made, Office 97 was the best version of MS Office ever made....it was less feature rich but more stable than word perfect suite and better integrated and documented than star office. By 2000 a variety of office suites began to surpass MS Office in utility and appearance and corel found some stability before disappearing shortly not long after staroffice opensourced, leading to the open source office revolution and eventually to the superior open document formats and ushering in support for a variety of database management systems, and google started fidgeting around with free online office features while MS started coming up with weird subscription and online activation ideas before it finally sank into the ribbons abyss that only government employees and contractors now find themselves buried in...
Windows 98 was WORSE than Windows Millennium (aka ME) - if only for this: when a program crashed in Win98, the entire OS would crash a few second later. When a program crashed in WinME, Windows would keep on running (and would only hang during shutdown), I remember well.
So, no, Windows ME was not the worst Version of Windows (Windows 11, anyone, LOL?)
Same with Windows Vista, by the way (which, I admit, I have only had from 2012 on, so I have not known the countless problems (??) from the first years).
To me, Vista was... the... well... "best" Windows version.
Oh, Vista, where art thou?...
I have decided I will not get that God-awful Windows 11 abomination.
I have never experienced disappointment from Windows Me coming from Windows 95. Played games and installed all my hardware drivers just fine. It’s a nice upgrade back then before upgrading to Windows Xp. I will never know why some nerds keeps whining about it since I skipped and never experienced 98 and 2K.
Like Vista, much of the rep is not deserved. When installed on a new machine it worked great. However, legacy support on marginal older systems was not great. I told people the same thing for both.
If you are getting or building a new system, get it. But do not upgrade your older system to it.
Sorry. As a PC Builder for the past 25 years, Vista was crap. If you dropped about $3000 on RAM, a fast hard drive and a fast video card, you could make a tolerable machine. But for 85% of the machines it was sold on, it was garbage. It honestly felt like running on a machine about 1/3 the speed of what you owned
@@10MARC not sure what you ran it on then. My dual core 64 bit system was way faster than it was under XP.
It ran circles around XP, and let me run 64 bit code also. As I stated, I bet you experience was with older single core 32 bit systems.
25 years, how nice. I already had that much before it came out, and have joked I should get "debug g=c800:5" tattooed on my arm.
@@0311Mushroom you hit the nail on the heads you had a nice dual core system probably with 8 or 16 gigs of RAM. Try running it on the common single core, 2 GB RAM systems that were affordable then. It was being bundled on systems it had no business even trying to boot on. Trust me. I was there selling and supporting machines then
@@10MARC and did I not say at the start it was great on current systems, but not on legacy ones? I would never suggest it on anything not 64 bit as a minimum. And told many to not upgrade because it provided them no benefit over XP.
Apparently vastly outnumbered, I actually liked "Me". At the time having progressed through the different versions of windows right from 3.0, it became my favourite version of windows. I used '98 for multiplayer Doom on Novell IPX networking but I generally preferred "Me". Even when XP came out, I didn't "like" it more than "Me", it was just the next in the line.
I don't think it's as bad as some say, haven't had any issues with it & if i have, were only rather minor. Was also the first OS i owned on my first PC back in 2002, don't remember all the specifications of it as i didn't look at that kind of thing back then. Had 64MB Ram a 2GB hard drive, standard beige box & the like you would've got then, still have the "Original" install CD that came with it, but the data rot has certainly gotten to it, though i keep it because it's one of the only things i have left of it. Is a copied disc, with the rbdc9 serial on it, that product key is everywhere on older windows OS'es. And the PC ran fine back then for me too. Haven't used any DOS type programs on ME, i have 95/98 machines for that if need be. Also have it on a Dell Latitude D600 & works good on there too, though it doesn't detect the DVD drive for whatever reason, so i use an external one when need be. Sure, can see why it wasn't much chop, everyone's experience with it was different would say, and in my case, has been fine. Back then on my first PC, and nowdays on the machines it is installed on.
It was ok with WHQL-signed drivers, but they made it too easy to install non-signed drivers, and the process to get WHQL certification too ornery. Because it was running drivers in Ring 0, it meant that a bad driver would cause a blue screen, and a whole lot of hardware manufacturers put out half-assed drivers. Sadly, XP still had the ability to be brought down by a bad driver, but they made it a lot harder to install non-signed drivers: wasn't until Vista that they introduced the ability to gracefully recover from a driver crash without bringing down the whole system. (I say this having switched to Windows 2000 the day they released SP4 with DirectX support...)
ME wasn't so bad...it had its own dialup winsock and supported netbios and ppp out of the box...that's more than could be said of most of the windows versions that came before it....it was just a major downgrade following the 9x line, the same way vista was a major downgrade following the nt5.x line--a boatload of unoptimized code and bloat piled in with an jumble of new ideas...
I don't know why all this hate. I used WinMe for about 2 years, I would call them "Win98 GT". So much faster than 98SE! And stable: The only BSOD I got, was when a friend of mine was using the PC.
Before Windows 10 I would have to say Windows ME was one of the worst commercially released OS's, but I think WIndows 10 takes the cake these days, and WIndows 10 was the OS that made me into a full time Manjaro Linux user.
Odd... you never mentioned that Microsoft officially back-ported features to Windows 98 SE. Which effectively made ME pointless, not once (XP), but twice.
I did an Me install for a pc I donated to a church - it was nothing but problems from the get-go.. . Crashes abounded and drivers were missing…
I loved it! Why? Primarily for one reason. WinME gave us the point-in-time System Checkpoints and Restores! As one who liked to hack a lot on my computer that one feature saved my bunnies over and over again.
I remember when I was 8 years old and was using windows me back then,never had any problems with it....Same goes with vista and windows 7 or windows 8 and 8.1.The most problems I had was on windows xp and windows 10 I would say.
You're lucky if you weren't old enough to be using Vista as a corporate operating system at work. It's hands down the worst Windows ever released. I think many people spend at least the same time phoning the company's IT support than doing work. Even brand new machines just out of the box crashed in simple tasks like waking up from a screen saver.
@@blue_jm Vista RTM is really bad. SP1 was okay - my cousin has a descent HP PC running Vista and he never had a major issue.
SP2 is as solid and stable as 7 RTM, but that was too late unfortunately.
Similar as Me, most of the crashing issue is caused by outdated drivers, especially GPU.
XP on me hanged a lot because i had 256MB of RAM back in the day. It worked fine when i upgraded to 1.5GB.
i still use windows 8.1 lol its better than 10 imo
@@youtubesucks1111 8.1 is good, but i hated Windows 8.
Love the content Dan.
Nice
I ran Windows Me for years and had no problems. I think a lot of people who had issues, those were either dirty upgrades or forcing 9x drivers on Me.
I've never been a fan of any Windows Environment. To say I think they're dog sh*t is putting it lightly. Give me Linux anytime.
I hear ya there, back in the 90's, and 00's I only put up with Windows because of games, and apps I needed to run, plus hardware support. Windows 10 on my main machine was the last straw for me when updates deleted folders off my main HDD, and where peaking my CPU at 100% load doing nothing but just sitting on the desktop about 2 years ago when everything else I had already moved onto Mint, and now Manjaro MATE. I'll take Linux, or even Chromium OS any day of the week. Hell I'll take the 13in Mid-2012 Macbook Pro I found at my local recycle drop off earlier this year running OSX Catalina over any Windows machine.
@@CommodoreFan64 I agree 100% my friend.
also! gee thanks now I'm gonna be binge watching your videos for quite a many hours! goodbye my daynight!
these rule, thanks man.
i knew I was in love with your content the second you mentioned GNU Hurd in your top 10 worst operating systems. i clapped! "bravo"
I think the problem with windows ME was kinda the same Vista: the average machines of the era Weren't not ready for it.
Also having XP out so close to it just simply killed ot
halfway between 98 and xp my English teacher used it for an entire year and it worked just fine.
Never had any problems with Windows Me during my use of it definately the clean install was the way to go with it and also installing the most current drivers certainly helped with stability everyone i installed it for at the time loved it.
Yeah, upgraded from 98 to ME and back to 98 the next day. And it was because of random crashes. The driver support was terrible at launch...
I always felt ashamed to like Windows ME, it was fine for me and never played up. Preferred it over it's predecessors and dual booted my with XP Pro as I couldn't let go! Interestingly enough around 2002/03 I was playing Geoff Crammond's GP4 and was getting better FPS from my ME install over XP. Great nostalgia trip, thanks!
PSA: 90% OF THE REASON ME DID POORLY WAS BECAUSE OF PUBLIC PRECEPTION AND A LACK OF DRIVERS. Thank you.
As for lack of drivers, that is the computer company's job, not Microsoft's. That's why so many computers would crash on it. Hardly anything to do with the stability of the OS itself, more so a lack of supported drivers. I have a Compaq Presario 5000 series that runs like a dream on ME, because it was designed for it. However it also runs like dogshit on win 98se with plus (which makes it about the same thing minus drivers), crashing a lot, freezing the most.
And with public perception, it's the same tale that would repeat with Vista.
ME was a good OS, just like Vista was. Both were plagued by unfortunate timing and an unreceptive public due to mishaps created by Microsoft and others, and so when marketing went downhill, everything did.
Revisit Vista sometime. Fully update it, maybe use it on an older HP COMPAQ 6000 PRO or something to a similar tune. Business machines of that time and a little later.
I assure you it runs like a dream on the Core 2 Duo with even 4 gigs of ram.
Yep I bought that new back in the day, no system builder OEM, full price. I don't remember it being crap but I did go buy XP at full retail price shortly after
ME got a lot of hate but it wasn't THAT bad, It shared a lot with WindowsXP.
3.1 95 98 98me
these versions are too bad in the face of a well-assembled workbench ^^
The main problem that appeared with ME was when it was an upgrade path from Win98SE which was a really stable OS (for the time). ME created so many driver conflicts and legacy software issues. As a standalone, fresh install, it was fairly ok. What also heaped on a number of issues was Freeserve - the release of THAT Freeserve CD caused so many issues. I had to reinstall so many OSes at the time.
Just one word on the PC - seeing a celeron of that age sends shudders up my spine.
I only only had issues with older systems that were upgraded from 98. A fresh install worked fine, even on older hardware.
sorry to say but you are wrong, the worst
os ever is win 10 and it will only get worse overtime
Patreon or ads. Pick one.
Oh go away
I must have used ME for about 5 years. I thought it was fine. I didn’t even realize it was supposed to be a dog til some friend was scoffing at it years into my use. And I did find Windows Restore to be helpful a few times.
I never used ME on my own system but my sister used it. I don't remember it being any worse than 98.
My mate had Windows ME for sometime around 2005 or so. I remember indeed having to help him finding suitable drivers that wouldn't crash his system all the time. I think he reinstalled ME at least 2 or 3 times while he had it. I believe it also was missing some things I could do on XP at that time that weren't available for ME. I can't remember what those things were, I think it might have been regarding to some networking stuff.
I think the main issue with Windows ME is that it wasn't a Service Pack for 98, you had to pay for a new version. I actually preferred it to 98SE and 2K. XP obviously much better but I hated Windows 8 and would have preferred ME to Windows 8 any day. Thanks for the review Dan its a good nostalgic trip to that time.
I went from Windows 7 to 10. How bad was 8?
What's your favourite console boot sound? For me it's got to be the PS1. To quote Dan it's both epic and slightly terrifying.
Use Windows Movie Maker on that machine to create your next youtube video, which should be about the experience of doing so.
I think this is the proper time to let Windows Me & Vista show its full potential, I'm now getting used to Windows Vista as it was so similar with Windows 7, stability & reliability, it performs very well if your PC is configured correctly. I hope one day, the hate for Windows Vista & Me will be gone soon
People forget what they do with their computer. Video editing, multitasking, running multimedia application, rapidly relaunching applications that physically access devices. They do this and blame the OS without understanding how it works.
never had the isues people complained with me and i was running a cyrx 266 with 64meg of ram, voodoo 2, shrugs
@Martin Dawson i had 333mhz i had underclocked to 266 forgot about that tillyou mentioned that witch fixed that issue
Hell, no! Windows 8 by a LONG shot.
Windows ME was so bad that it glitched out so much that I thought that _I_ was doing something wrong! I thought I was just really bad at computers and was somehow inadvertently messing things up.
oh look, there is a video somewhere between all those ads
I installed Windows ME the day it was released. Stayed on my computer for almost a week.
Enjoyed your video of windows Me iv got an old desktop and look forward to trying Me for myself and I am glad you mentioned the Retrozilla browser iv been looking for a browser to work with old operating systems for quite a while and this will be really useful thanks
I am a computer Tech person and have been since windows 3.1 and I loved Vista and Windows ME over XP and Windows 98.... Most people at that time had budget computers like HP that could barely run what came pre-installed, and some were built for win95 that had been upgraded to win98 and then again to winME and they simply didn't have what it takes to run ME efficiently so people blamed the OS instead of there PC's, by XP time most people had replaced there PC with a new XP budget PCs and ended up hating Vista for pretty much the same reasons as winME. Budget machines poorly running the OS.
I think I have a Windows ME machine sitting around here... maybe its time clean it up and make a video...
whats worse than windows ME? raid sponsor.
For me it's not worst at all😉😉, the only Problem in "Windows Me" was it's "Slow Keyboard Function" then we found out that when we "Upgrade" from "Windows 98SE" to "Windows Millennium" that the "Tweak" is "Adjust" the "Keyboard Speed" on "Control Panel"..👍👍😎
I was Linux-ing back in those days.
I love Linux, and run Manjaro MATE on all my main systems, and my first experience was RedHat 386 back in the mid 90's along with Corel Linux but at the time as an AMD fan, and a gamer I had to go back to Windows sadly. I'm so glad AMD finally got their stuff together for Linux, codes good open source drivers.
@@CommodoreFan64 BSD is better.
@@uriituw But which modern BSD OS? I’ve dabbled with FreeBSD for the ZFS support.
@@666lordofdestruction macOS or just FreeBSD.
Linux has come a long way since then
That Mitsubishi CRT is beautiful, man.
I didn't know Mitsubishi made CRT Monitors.
Excellent video as always Dan! What model of Pentium 4 is in your Windows 98 PC? I love Windows 98 and use Pentium II PCs are pretty expensive here in the USA.
I went through the 95 , 98, 98SE and ME in period, as well as trying NT4.0, Win2K and eventually going full time NT Kernel with Windows XP.
I remember being really excited about XP when it was launched I was at college.
But in hind sight I think 98SE serves the best position for Retro Gaming PC's as you can run everything on it.
But I definitely used ME for quite some time and really enjoyed it in period. I'd use it today albeit the DOS mode of Win98SE takes the biscuit 🍪
Once you got a slipstream app and ripped everything out of it that was not needed for it to boot it was not so bad .
Bought the full retail version when it came out, never had any issues. Although like you said dos gaming was hit or miss for me.
I have used Windows Me back in the days and was rock-solid for me. It even sound better due to drivers on my Yamaha OPL3-SAX sound card with better bass and treble than on Windows 2000 which had the sound muffled and kinda metal-ish treble. I remember that I had a TV tuner which had crisp and better display of TV channels than on Windows 2000 which displayed the cannels more blurry.
Windows ME Was My Childhood Favorite Desktop Operating System In 2000 And 2001!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!❤️🖤🖤❤️🔥
I must be the only person on Earth that liked Windows Me
I DID!
I would not sell Windows ME back then. I think of the hundreds of machines we sold in 2000 - 2001 we maybe built about 10 with Windows ME.
I recall the common PC speeds for an economical system being 450 - 750 MHz back then with 1 GHz machines being the high end. Windows ME was quite slow on those machines...
We also knew it was a "Band Aid" OS before their real 32 bit OS would be shipping. In short, my home users got Windows 98SE and business users got the very nice Windows 2000.
ran my studio in 2000-2002 on it on a custom built PIII 1Ghz, 1Gb ram, Matrox Millenium G400 with Yamaha DS2416 soundcard and AW44 expansion running Logic 5.5. was one of the most stable and responsive systems i ever used. switch to the mac in late 2002 when apple bought Emagic and it took many years to get a replacement as solid.
I grabbed a copy off the shelf from my local pc hardware shop on release. I couldn't believe a legit copy of Windows was only £30. I found out why when my windmodem refused to work after ME was installed. It helpfully offered to go online to find a working driver. :-)
I used Windows Me back in the day and I had no negative experiences with it. I think people just blamed it when they installed bad drivers or got viruses.
I never had ME but my mate did and I don't remember there being any problems with it. I agree, people were also much less tech savvy in general back then and also I think in some cases hardware of that period didn't always play nicely. Rarely does an OS work perfectly on the generation of hardware it releases with, it only truly comes into its own a few years later once everything has been throughly tested and optimized.
@5:38 how about "More Errors" or "Misery Edition"
Windows SE= Windows §hitty Edition
Windows ME was regarded as ”not worth it/ not that good” back when released by most users as I remember it. You will always find positive or negative reviews if you look for them.
But win me is not as bad as most say.