Windows ME is better. No one knew it at the time. But 17 years later, that's my opinion.

98 was way easier than dealing with Win95. I remember the fun times of fixing corrupted networking stacks.

The original Win95 without IE integrated in was soooo speedy.

Malik wrote:

I didn't have the opportunity to use Windows 98, but went straight to Windows 98SE. For me, Win98 and Win95 have the same UI so, I neither love nor hate Win98. And Windows 98SE is the OS I still use in my Pentium 4 machine.

Well god bless ya buddy for your love of 95 and 98se 😀

Isnt it a beautiful os??

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

JaKSLaP wrote:

Agreed!
Windows95, 98 is a complete mess, only reason people use it is for all the awesome games it supports

Thirded. It was an absolute PITA to get 98SE to get along with my SB Live! cards but now it's all taken care of after trying a few different drivers to see which one was the correct one for my card model, on computers with subpar integrated audio chipsets this wasn't a problem but there was the usual lack of DirectSound acceleration which totally ruined the experience.

Fourthed! Win9x sucked then, it still sucks now. Win2K (and later WinXP) was a gift sent from the heavens.

I agree with Kreshna. I only built and maintain my collection of Win98SE systems so that I can run games on them that don't work as well under NT. In particular, European Air War. There are many others that work better under Win9x as well.

Has anybody tried the newer EAW v1.50 or v1.60 unofficial updates?

http://simhq.com/forum/ubbthreads.php/topics/4150099/1

My first OS was Win95 but I will go for 98SE as a final release of the 95 IMO.

Mister Xiado wrote:

Well, it came with my first computer, and I still have the CD and key for it. I guess I have to like it? Only thing I don't like is the fonts going weird at high resolution.

Same here, I got 98 with my first PC..but err, I don't have the key anymore because well I 'borrowed' mine 😊
I later made good by using a real WinME copy, which I still have and because I had no choice but to make due with ME (as 98SE was WAY more popular then ME at the time) and grown to love it. I never liked 98FE as it BSoD-ed a lot on me, several times a day I put up with that crap 🤣
Blue screens went away after installing ME, but now and again it would also do "funny stuff" 😁

XP and later was indeed more stable, but 9x runs WAY better on certain older hardware configurations.

Even though I more or less grew up with Windows 98, I really don't love it. In fact years ago (back in 2010/2011), I went out of my way to torrent a stripped down version of the version of XP (but it wasn't TinyXP or MicroXP) and installed it on the Socket A athlon system I had at the time. I think what really made me despise 98 at the time was the DLL errors that even were there on a fresh install. The fact, that my graphics card wasn't supported didn't made things any better. Unless I installed the drivers, Windows 98 was stuck at 640x480 with 16 colors. Plus, there were drivers for the wireless card I borrowed from another system and those drivers didn't work on 98.

dexvx wrote:

Windows ME is better. No one knew it at the time. But 17 years later, that's my opinion.

It's better as Windows. But in Win9x era many people (gamers especially) still wanted access to pure DOS, which WinME took away (although you could hack it back). This cause a great deal of backlash.

FWIW I still haven't really recovered my backed-up WinME installs as easily as I could for 95 and 98.... WinME will try its best to mask the registry panic and shut down automatically instead of even allowing a safe mode startup leaving you without a clue on what actually happened.

leileilol wrote:

WinME will try its best to mask the registry panic and shut down automatically instead of even allowing a safe mode startup leaving you without a clue on what actually happened.

It's a lot like NT-based OSs in this regard, no?

I've been in cases where XP/Vista/7 could not start even in safe mode, and to fix whatever was fixable in the registry I had to load it as a remote hive on another installation (or through the installation media).

I used to really love Win98SE, until Vogons made me try out WinMe for my Voodoo 3 build. I remember the OS being a complete dog and a pile of shit when it comes to stability, but my experience with it using the latest drivers for everything was incredibly smooth. Rhese days lack of proper USB mass storage and MIDI device support alone makes me want to go for an MS-DOS 7.1/WinME dual boot instead of Win98SE any day. That's probably what I'll do for my Optiplex system that aims to encompass 1992-2000 gaming (along with an install of Win2KSP4 for a real OS to work with, of course).

With some tweaking yes, you can make Windows Me pretty solid. Though I still prefer 98SE but for P4 machines Me seems to play better.

oeuvre wrote:

With some tweaking yes, you can make Windows Me pretty solid. Though I still prefer 98SE but for P4 machines Me seems to play better.

Even for Coppermine and onwards P3, Me is the way to go for me.

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

With some tweaking yes, you can make Windows Me pretty solid. Though I still prefer 98SE but for P4 machines Me seems to play better.

Even for Coppermine and onwards P3, Me is the way to go for me.

ME seemed to work pretty much fine for me from basically anything 400MHz and up. Used it for years, even ended up writing an install guide of some sorts at some point with many of the tips and tricks I used 😀
I absolutely loved the native USB storage ME has! 😁
ME does require some tweaking for it to work optimally, but does have somewhat higher minimum system requirements compared to 98SE (rule of thump to me was 400MHz + 128MB RAM + 1GB partition for ME alone).

Btw, I don't consider the tweaking of ME some extra step that 98SE doesn't have. I tweak all my installs (unless I'm extremely lazy or in a rush or something) and I consider things like drivers and programs to be part of the tweaking process. It's basically not really a big difference to me if I install ME and disable some stuff or install 98SE and install some stuff.

Me doesn't seem to have a resource kit so I can't batch myself or sneak driver infs in conveniently like I could with 98 either 😒

appiah4 wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

With some tweaking yes, you can make Windows Me pretty solid. Though I still prefer 98SE but for P4 machines Me seems to play better.

Even for Coppermine and onwards P3, Me is the way to go for me.

I agree that Windows ME is a good choice for machines that won't be used for native DOS stuff. I actually have Windows ME on my Dell Inspiron 8000 laptop and it seems to be more reliable than 98SE on that same machine, the inclusion of a USB mass storage driver and the higher RAM limit makes it more modern than prior 9x versions.

The only gripe I encountered is that the ability to make a bootable DOS diskette is removed but that can easily be fixed with RawWriteWin and a disk image of a DOS boot disk, then again I believe all NT versions prior to XP suffered from this left-out too.

Does the MS-DOS Mode for WinMe hack actually work, by the way? I remember hearing HIMEM or EMM386 or some such didn't work and it was essentially useless after all?

dexvx wrote:

Windows ME is better. No one knew it at the time. But 17 years later, that's my opinion.

But I remember TIE Fighter failed to run in ME's DOS prompt.

Kreshna Aryaguna Nurzaman wrote:

dexvx wrote:

Windows ME is better. No one knew it at the time. But 17 years later, that's my opinion.

But I remember TIE Fighter failed to run in ME's DOS prompt.

It rubs on mine. Granted its the CD version but it works 100%