Yeah, I don't understand what all the fuss is about with ME being unstable. It does have some problems, but they are easily mitigated, as what people say, turn off system restore, run some patches (fewer than 95/98!). Really WinME does represent the best of the of 9x series had to offer. The only reason not to run it, is if your computer is too old, or possibly too new? (I know people can figure out some amazing things)
Win95 is probably the "buggiest" but better than Win3.1 for 32-bit applications and performance (obvious). It is great on older machines than ME can't do. Things started to go more south with IE4 active desktop being released for Win95.
Win98 FE (the original) on release day was pretty rough because of IE4, and still was famously buggy. SE things started to improve (not unlike Win95 B), and had some longer life compared to other 9x's. (... but on that Win95 still has life too... when fully patched as well, so I would find Win95 and 98 comparable, especially if you are gonna run IE4 ... bleh)
WinME is basically Win98 reskinned to looking like 2000/XP, fully patched, and maybe even gave 9x series a year longer life for those that bothered to stay on 9x than it would have if MS never released it. Many people use WinME components on 98 for a reason... it's newer/better!
Having run many machines with WinME back in the day, and revisiting it today ... it feel like a great, modernish Windows! True it's the old kernel, but if you ignore the productivity reasons to move to WinXP (all obsolete applications now), what's really different about WinME, especially on contemporary machines?
As for blue screens, I hardly saw them by the time WinME rolled in. Can't say it was really that bad. I've mentioned this a number of times, I think the rep that it got was because Microsoft itself wanted to kill it quickly! I think they're ultimately why these rumors are around. How are blue screens in WinME really any different than the older windows? Or even newer?
SETBLASTER wrote on 2023-02-06, 05:47:
More than 20 years have passed and i still find incredible that after installing windows ME and installing a couple of drivers, it was a BSOD festival.
That bad? Sorry, I don't think it has anything to do with the driver model. (VXD vs WDM). Win98 has support for WDM, and installs that for many cards by default too. If anything, WinME should be better as it lifts even more support code from the latest NT/XP branch that was contemporary at the time. I think your issue is specific to your machine, which possibly could be solved by investigating. I wouldn't try to strike up a rule of thumb on what the stability issues are by this. I'm not clear if you're using a P3 440BX on this. Are you saying that Win98 would be better on this, or XP? Whatever you pick, and why, I'd like to hear, or see that you solve the problem on WinME.
schmatzler wrote:
I installed WinME on my Abit VH6T a while ago and it ran very stable...until I installed the VXD drivers for my OpTi Mad16 Pro sound card. Then it crashed very often.
So I guess WinME really doesn't like VXD drivers. I stick to WDM drivers now when I use it.
I've switched between WDM to VXD for ESS and Creative, for the known reasons, but not for blue screens. Both were fine. I can't remember if there were any other cards I have tried on this OS. So the more likely reasons are buggy drivers. It can be that buggy VXD drivers were more likely to cause the system to be unstable, and why they were being phased out. But that kind of points the blame at Opti.