Nothing is wrong with the Windows ME. I believe it was highly underrated and not too many people have actually used it. Back in the early 2000s I had it installed on my Athlon XP 1400+ Palomino PC and used it for a few years. Stability wise it was on the same level with Windows 98SE or slightly better if my memory serves me right. I guess its real plus is that it supports over 512MB of RAM. Furthermore, I actually plan to buy a boxed copy of it.

I have come to the same conclusion, almost nobody has actually used Windows Me. If they did, they'd realize it's practically the same thing as Windows 98SE, the supposed gold standard of 9x stability. It makes sense though, considering Microsoft, you know, built Windows Me from the 98SE codebase... Like they did for 98SE with 98FE and so on.

Hey now. I've actually used it from 2000-2001 and then 2004-2005 as a 2K/ME dualboot. A lot of the problems are very exaggerated and a lot of feature complaints are mislead (many of the 'annoyances' debuted earlier in Win2000), though... I never did use System Restore.

That's not to say it isn't pefect though. Getting the DOS SB Live TSR loaded without being 'smartly' eaten, to play dos games through Me natively is a pain, and there's automatic shutdowns on general protection errors, shuffling the 'need to reinstall Windows' out of sight without any clue to as of what happened.

There are a lot of idiots out there that claim Windows Me is an alias of Windows 2000 however given the tight release windows and turnofthemillenium craze

Well, it doesn't help Windows Me looks and sounds like 2000. They couldn't be any more different though. One is 9x, the other is NT.

I'm happy 9x got one more big update with Windows Me, it's great for 9x games if you don't need DOS that badly and if you have newer hardware.

Now I think of it, I think I have a spare copy of Me... might end up putting that on my spare Athlon box - yes, possibly dual boot with real DOS, but it's probably too fast to make a decent DOS box - could also dual with XP as the system does have a legitimate OEM XP key (not sure if there is anywhere to download a pre-patched XP, as my other XP machine is dying)

I think the main criticisms of Me were that it broke things that worked in Win98 (needed later CD writer software, for instance) while not really adding much, being more like an overpriced 3rd edition of 98.

I didn't like Windows ME and 98. They just weren't stable enough even for home users. Way too many bizzaro BSODs and illegal operation errors. Poor network stack. The multi-threading was just plain terrible. Try opening the start menu when you have a video playing in the background. No matter how fast your computer is, the video will pause as the start menu pops up. Animated tool tips have the same effect. None of that happens in 2000 or XP, even on slow computers. 9x/ME just feels like such a cobbled together, unfinished hack job of an operating system.

I had to use Win98 on my machine at home because NT4 couldn't do everything I needed, but by the time ME was released, I was happily using Win2000.

Windows Vista: now there's a misunderstood operating system. 😉

I should probably mention something else really quick...

I did also utilize 98lite for my Me installation, stripping out components that I felt were superfluous, like Media Player 7 and Movie Maker. Not sure if that would help with stability as well, but yeah thought I'd mention it.

I used Windows 2000 and loved it. Then because of finances I had to downgrade my hardware and decided Win9x would run better (use less resources) on the new, less powerful PC. Windows ME just came out so I went with that. That PC crashed almost daily and I always thought it was just some flaky hardware. Before I built a new computer, I installed Win98 SE and it never crashed again.

Windows 9x only gets the Blue Screen of Death or illegal operations if you are doing something very wrong, like forcing a bad driver or ending programs that are in the middle of accessing hardware. I've used 98SE for a very long time and it behaves for me just fine.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

I didn't like Windows ME and 98. They just weren't stable enough even for home users. Way too many bizzaro BSODs and illegal operation errors. Poor network stack. The multi-threading was just plain terrible. Try opening the start menu when you have a video playing in the background. No matter how fast your computer is, the video will pause as the start menu pops up. Animated tool tips have the same effect. None of that happens in 2000 or XP, even on slow computers. 9x/ME just feels like such a cobbled together, unfinished hack job of an operating system.

I had to use Win98 on my machine at home because NT4 couldn't do everything I needed, but by the time ME was released, I was happily using Win2000.

Windows Vista: now there's a misunderstood operating system. 😉

I dunno, I've been using 9X-based stuff for a very long time and don't remember having any major issues with those OSes. Some of those problems you described (animated tooltips etc.) sound kinda nitpicky to my mind, and I'm pretty sure you can disable that stuff.

EDIT/OT: holy crap 500 posts

notsofossil wrote:

When is the virtual DOS environment not enough? I've used 9x's virtual DOS for over a decade and it's always served me well.

Some games really only want real mode and direct hardware access. It's been a long time since I investigated, so I don't remember exactly which ones gave me problems and which did not.

notsofossil wrote:

As for motherboard drivers, well these newer machines must be defying logic. I tried Windows 98SE on a Dell Latitude D600 and during the last stretch of installation, it reported that the PCMCIA and CD drivers had to be updated because they were outdated. The wording is rather confusing. If you skip the driver update there, the CD drive won't appear in My Computer or device manager. Installing the motherboard driver fixes this problem.

As I said, I never tried any flavor on Win9x on something so new, and I didn't see the point. I don't remember 9x ever asking for motherboard drivers to see CD and floppy, but you could be right. For the PCMCIA, I am confident that it would require drivers.

I had ME. Still have it, actually. On my machine at the time it was so slow and I was annoyed at the lack of real DOS and little things like not being able to hold shift to restart Windows only (not the whole machine) and other things that just made the thing seem clunky and bogged it down. Went straight from 98SE to XP. The biggest problem was no real DOS. I needed that. There were plenty of games that would only work properly in real DOS with real DOS drivers.

dr_st wrote:

As I said, I never tried any flavor on Win9x on something so new, and I didn't see the point. I don't remember 9x ever asking for motherboard drivers to see CD and floppy, but you could be right. For the PCMCIA, I am confident that it would require drivers.

In case you're wondering, I was trying to put Windows 98SE on a Pentium M laptop with an Intel 855PM chipset. So far that is the newest PC I've had any luck putting 98SE or ME on. By that I mean the motherboard chipset, video and sound have working drivers. I consider networking to be optional.

MusicallyInspired wrote:

I had ME. Still have it, actually. On my machine at the time it was so slow and I was annoyed at the lack of real DOS and little things like not being able to hold shift to restart Windows only (not the whole machine) and other things that just made the thing seem clunky and bogged it down. Went straight from 98SE to XP. The biggest problem was no real DOS. I needed that. There were plenty of games that would only work properly in real DOS with real DOS drivers.

Control Panel > Add/Remove Programs > Startup Disk. It's at least something.

I used ME for a while back in the day. On hardware ME was designed for it ran well, too many people tried using it on older hardware and had issues. I ended up going Win2k and liked it more because one app (or game) didn't take out the whole system. By the time ME came out I don't think too many people were still using DOS games.

Original retail ME disks are kind of rare, I have a couple.

I'm only interested in a real copy of Windows Me OEM version. I guess for now, my Lightscribe copy will do.

Slight diversion. Here's a screenshot from my Windows Me install. Works great!

Here's an IBM Thinkpad T42 running Windows Me.

notsofossil wrote:

Here's an IBM Thinkpad T42 running Windows Me.

Nice! You weren't kidding about it running with 1 GB of memory!!

Welcome to the Me club 🤣.

It really is a good OS, just as good as 98SE. ME's built-in USB mass storage has been really handy as of late.

I don't know if it helps, but this Thinkpad T42 has only one RAM slot, thus 1GB is the most it can do.

notsofossil wrote:

Here's an IBM Thinkpad T42 running Windows Me. […]
Show full quote

Here's an IBM Thinkpad T42 running Windows Me.

Nice wallpaper! 🤣

Also, for the record, the T4X series ThinkPads have two RAM slots... One on the bottom of the laptop, and one located beneath the keyboard.