VOGONS


Reply 21 of 44, by FFXIhealer

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From what I can remember, I found the opposite. Sure, we all know what it was like when a driver would brick a Windows 98 install and you'd end up wiping the hard drive all over again just to get it stable, but Win98 would run perfectly fine for a year or more. My only experience with WinMe includes almost daily crashes and blue-screens. And it's been so long since I last tried using it that I can't recall WHY I kept getting crashes. All I know is that it had to go, so I built my mom's older Windows Vista machine and it was stable for its entire lifespan.

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Reply 22 of 44, by Jo22

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FFXIhealer wrote:

From what I can remember, I found the opposite. Sure, we all know what it was like when a driver would brick a Windows 98 install and you'd end up wiping the hard drive all over again just to get it stable, but Win98 would run perfectly fine for a year or more. My only experience with WinMe includes almost daily crashes and blue-screens. And it's been so long since I last tried using it that I can't recall WHY I kept getting crashes. All I know is that it had to go, so I built my mom's older Windows Vista machine and it was stable for its entire lifespan.

When Me was new, I disliked its huge hardware requirements - in comparison to Windows 98SE.
At the time, I had a Pentium 75 or so with 24MB of RAM and a 500MB HDD..
(It was also the first version to be BIOS-dongled/vendor-locked, as far as I know.)

Looking backwards, though, Me wasn't that bad if the hardware was right (-> early XP era hardware).
For example, it copied the whole driver's library to HDD and supported pen drives and flash cards natively.

It also supported Universal Plug&Play, which was nice for home networks. And it had a Win2k style network architecture, too.
Overall, it wasn't that bad featurewiese. It also had DirectX 7.1 exlusively, which was the last one of the classic DirectX (at the time).
I'm speaking under correction, but it also supported newer versions of ACPI and used a Windows version of ScanDisk.
Lastly, it also added a new Registry hive that was removed in XP again.

On the down side, it removed things like Personal Web Sever and Sysedit.
And support for compressed partitions was removed (but could continue to use existing ones),
unless some older Windows 98 files were copied over.

Some issue that Me had, was, that it got sold as an update mainly. Honestly, how many people/users did the installation the right way ? 😉
I.e, not installation Me over Win9x, but a clean install on a fresh formatted HDD with a subsequent boot from the Win9x/Me CD
and manual invoking of setup.exe from withing the WIN9X folder..

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Reply 23 of 44, by FFXIhealer

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Well, I'd give it an honest shot if I had a copy of it. Same with Windows 2000 - one I've never actually used or even had to deal with before. I think the closest thing I ever used to Windows 2000 was the one time I encountered Windows Server 2003 somewhere. That was, like, ONCE.

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Reply 25 of 44, by appiah4

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dr_st wrote:

Server 2003 is XP, not 2000.

XP is technically 2000 with a shitty GUI, so..

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Reply 26 of 44, by dr_st

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The shitty GUI is optional, icon text background transparency actually works, and it supports plug-n-play and gaming-related APIs better, apparently.

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Reply 27 of 44, by Errius

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I remember going to a LAN in late 2001. I was still running Windows 98 but everybody else there had Windows 2000, or were dual booting W98/W2K. Windows ME was just a big joke. Nobody had it, nobody wanted it.

Is this too much voodoo?

Reply 28 of 44, by mattrock1988

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This may seem like blasphemy for most here on VOGONS, but just the other day, I did a fresh dual boot setup with PC DOS and Windows Me to replace my original Windows 98 SE install. I never expected this to be the case, but Windows Me has ended up being more stable for me in my testing, especially after I ran the 98lite utility to strip away PCHEALTH, WMP7, and a few other half baked components. For reference, I'm using a Pentium III powered system, based on the legendary 440BX chipset. The tangible benefits of switching over are as follows.

- Advanced Power Management actually works correctly and my computer properly shuts down without a hang.
- The out of the box support for mass storage devices on USB has been a godsend. You can back port this to Windows 98, but USB drive ejection never properly worked for my system, which required yanking the drive out anyway and possibly corrupting the drive contents on occasion.
- Starting up AND shutting down is definitely faster.
- With the exception of my Aureal Vortex 2 drivers, everything else has a WDM driver equivalent that runs more consistently at the small cost of performance.

My Aureal Vortex 2 was the only semi-problematic bit of hardware to get up and running on Windows Me at first. But thanks to a suggestion from swaaye here on the forums, I've been able to get the 2015 revision drivers to work flawlessly (even if it comes at the expense of EAX support, which I didn't really care for on Aureal cards anyway). I also had to force disable the Sound Blaster Pro emulation, as I'm already rocking an AWE64 Gold and didn't want the resource conflicts.

Also, let's be real. Dropping into MS-DOS mode on Windows 98 (using a custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS setup via Exit to Dos) required a reboot to take effect, so if I was going to reboot, may as well just have two distinct OSes and save myself the trouble.

My verdict on the whole thing? Totally worthwhile and I'd do it again if I had to.

Retro PC: Intel Pentium III @ 1 GHz, Intel SE440BX-2, 32 GB IDE DOM, 384 MB SDRAM, DVD-ROM, 1.44 MB floppy, Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 AGP, Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, Aureal Vortex 2
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Reply 29 of 44, by dr_st

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mattrock1988 wrote:

This may seem like blasphemy for most here on VOGONS, but just the other day, I did a fresh dual boot setup with PC DOS and Windows Me to replace my original Windows 98 SE install. I never expected this to be the case, but Windows Me has ended up being more stable for me in my testing

It sounds like blasphemy to people who don't have a clue - e.g., they never used it, formed their opinion on hearsay or on some early trials when the OS may really have suffered from instability (forgetting that 95/98 may have suffered from the same growing pains). Kind of like the people who still think Windows XP is a better OS than Windows Vista.

mattrock1988 wrote:

Also, let's be real. Dropping into MS-DOS mode on Windows 98 (using a custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS setup via Exit to Dos) required a reboot to take effect, so if I was going to reboot, may as well just have two distinct OSes and save myself the trouble.

Disagree. If I need DOS and Windows, I'd rather just have 98SE, especially if it's a system primarily for DOS games, with Windows gaming being secondary.

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Reply 30 of 44, by mattrock1988

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mattrock1988 wrote:

Also, let's be real. Dropping into MS-DOS mode on Windows 98 (using a custom AUTOEXEC.BAT and CONFIG.SYS setup via Exit to Dos) required a reboot to take effect, so if I was going to reboot, may as well just have two distinct OSes and save myself the trouble.

Disagree. If I need DOS and Windows, I'd rather just have 98SE, especially if it's a system primarily for DOS games, with Windows gaming being secondary.

Fair enough. I guess from my perspective, it makes little difference to me. I have PloP the boot loader installed and I'm able to switch OSes quite easily.

Retro PC: Intel Pentium III @ 1 GHz, Intel SE440BX-2, 32 GB IDE DOM, 384 MB SDRAM, DVD-ROM, 1.44 MB floppy, Nvidia GeForce 4 Ti 4600 AGP, Creative SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, Aureal Vortex 2
I only rely on 86box these days. My Pentium 3 PC died. 🙁

Reply 31 of 44, by ssokolow

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keropi wrote:

I like ME for some higher speed p3+ with good hardware that has WDM drivers. I personally never had any problems with those rules but I can see hardware/driver combos becoming a hell with ME...

I never had ME at the time (though I think I remember pirating a copy while I was in high school, launching it in a VM or on some spare hard drive or something, and extracting the icons and sounds for use on my Win98SE) but, as I hear it, that "has WDM drivers" part is the key.

Apparently WinME really doesn't like it when you mix old and new drivers in the same system.

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Reply 33 of 44, by FFXIhealer

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dr_st wrote:

It sounds like blasphemy to people who don't have a clue - e.g., they never used it, formed their opinion on hearsay or on some early trials when the OS may really have suffered from instability (forgetting that 95/98 may have suffered from the same growing pains). Kind of like the people who still think Windows XP is a better OS than Windows Vista.

You better be careful saying that around here. I get flamed on the regular if I bring up how stable and GOOD Windows Vista was. In a number of ways, it was quite a bit better than Windows XP and still is.

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Reply 35 of 44, by appiah4

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Vista was OK but its GUI had a very unrealistic performance target for a mainstream OS.

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Reply 36 of 44, by Tetrium

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Fusion wrote:

Everyone seems to hate on ME for many reasons.

I don't know where you're getting this impression from 🤣

Anyway, I used 98FE when it was new. 98SE wasn't out yet and at some point I reinstalled the main OS to ME.
And I wanted a real one, but could only get my hands on an ME disk as 98SE was at the time way more popular and sought after, so I ended up using ME.

And as I started building more rigs, I was kinda forced to use ME or 95 as I really didn't like 98FE and I learned how to handle installing ME.

I basically started the install with as minimum as I could (just the motherboard with CPU and memory graphics card and harddrive and I would add the sound and NIC and other stuff only after the initial install and disabling of some of the ME features.

After years I finally was able to get a 98SE disk, but I ended up preferring ME more.

ME used to have a very bad reputation, but this is not deserved.

Btw, anyone else here surprised at how many people here seem to prefer ME over 98SE? That wasn't always the case 😜

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Reply 37 of 44, by clueless1

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Tetrium wrote:

ME used to have a very bad reputation, but this is not deserved.

Btw, anyone else here surprised at how many people here seem to prefer ME over 98SE? That wasn't always the case 😜

I think at the time it was deserved, but we've all had 20 years to get to know what it's good at and not good at. 😀 Not surprised at all, considering. We're all wiser and the OS is recognized for its strengths in the retro computing community. Same goes for Vista. Now that it's EOL, it's had lots of patches and can be run on whatever hardware we want, so the initial weaknesses are either gone or easy to circumvent.

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Reply 39 of 44, by weldum

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i personally prefer windows me over 98se mostly due to convenience, i don't have a dos machine (use dosbox instead) and i find that, using good drivers it works perfectly.
hell, i even had more problems with 98se and 95 osr2.5 than with ME, Vista or 8.

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