Carlos S. M. wrote:

Sorry for reviving a really old thread, but days ago, i found an old Packard Bell iconnect 2860 with Windows ME installed and de […]
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Sorry for reviving a really old thread, but days ago, i found an old Packard Bell iconnect 2860 with Windows ME installed and decided to try out WIndows ME on that PC, despite how was the OS crictizied, Windows ME ran perfectly on that machine and no crashes so far, i didn't see it BSOD'ing ethier. Also Windows ME unlike Windows 98, recorgnized USB drives out of the box. I hope this ME install goes well and not like when it was expected to crash or fail. I was more of a Windows 98 SE guy for really old PCs, but Windows ME did impress me at some point (about running without issues or some features)

The PC specs are:

Intel Pentium III 866 MHz
512 MB RAM (originally 64 MB RAM)
Gigabyte GA-6WMM7 OEM version for Packard Bell
Realtek RTL8139 PCI network card
AMR Modem
Creative CT-7235-VDQ card
Quantumn Fireball lct 20 GB + Seagate 7200.7 120 GB HDD
Windows ME

Additional tips and tricks and talk can be found here Tetrium's guide to Windows ME and here Windows Me - "Misunderstood Edition"
These pages are also listed on the Vogons Interesting Threads page on the Vogonswiki.

Your specs look pretty much fine btw. I actually remember how square that motherboard was 🤣

Btw, did anyone happen to have saved a copy of that (buggy) SP2 for ME? nvm it's still there 😊

Carlos S. M. wrote:

512 MB RAM

The main condition for the stable WinME work.

Gamecollector wrote:

Carlos S. M. wrote:

512 MB RAM

The main condition for the stable WinME work.

I tested ME with the original 64 MB RAM when i got that PC and it worked fine, but i upgraded the RAM to speed up things, also since is the max the mobo can handle

Personally I think ME runs fine with 192MB RAM (was using PC-100 @ PC-66, perhaps with a bit lower CAS latencies but I ccan't remember) and tweaking a couple bits really can help, especially with disabling a couple features like that system restore and a few other tweaks.

ME really likes faster CPUs more that 98SE but it ran fine on my K6-III/400 rig. A bit speedier HDD also helpes in this regard. One can give rigs with slower CPUs proportionally more RAM (like 400MHz and 512MB) but that doesn't really help that much (though it shouldn't hurt either to go to at least 512MB, unless the board itself gives troubles). It does help with speedier rigs that are used with newer games.

Windows ME works amazingly well on Pentium M systems (laptops in this case). It even works with 1GB system RAM. No more than that though. For higher end systems with Win9x drivers, Windows ME is my first choice. I save Windows 98SE for older systems that have an actual Soundblaster-16 ISA card.

Forgot to grab some evidence, see the attached image below.

notsofossil wrote:

Windows ME works amazingly well on Pentium M systems (laptops in this case). It even works with 1GB system RAM. No more than that though. For higher end systems with Win9x drivers, Windows ME is my first choice. I save Windows 98SE for older systems that have an actual Soundblaster-16 ISA card.

Yup, I agree. I've also had a good experience with Me on ThinClients so far (provided they had enough RAM, say +64MB).
And I'm saying this as someone who used Win98SE as a primary OS for many years in his youth (until XP came to rescue, haha ^^)..
So I'd say I'm not looking through rose-colored glasses when it comes to Windows Me (at least I think so).
And even on 98SE it's better to use Creative's VXDs. Well, sometimes, at least (OMG can't believe I'm actually saying this 😳 ):
The SB16 variants with EMU8000 synth do require drivers v2.25(w31) to v4.25(9x) for the MOD player AMP for Windows 2.5 to work.
That's because the AWE WDM drivers do lack the necesarry APIs for low-level stuff.

I'm shortly going to put ME on an old socket 7 machine to test the board's USB functionality. One thing ME does really well is hardware driver support. I know you can get USB running in Windows 98 and 95, and I eventually want to put Windows 95 on this machine, but for initial testing purposes I'm going to use ME.

It quickly becomes a royal pain when you go to install Windows 98 on a PC that it doesn't have chipset driver support, often the end result (for me at least) is no CD, PC card or sometimes even floppy drivers. In other words, no easy way to inject the USB drivers (and chipset/video/sound/etc) drivers into the computer. With Windows ME, there is no such nonsense.

notsofossil wrote:

It quickly becomes a royal pain when you go to install Windows 98 on a PC that it doesn't have chipset driver support, often the end result (for me at least) is no CD, PC card or sometimes even floppy drivers. In other words, no easy way to inject the USB drivers (and chipset/video/sound/etc) drivers into the computer. With Windows ME, there is no such nonsense.

Now you mention that, this reminds me of Windows Vista without any Service Packs:
It was hard to even install this one on my sister's computer, because it constantly crashed during installation (neverending blue screens).
So I had to repeat over and over, until it was installed. After I installed a Service Pack, the system was much more stable.
No crashes since then happened anymore. Of course, I wouldn't dare to ever compare Win98SE to Vista SP0. Nope, I would never do that.