IMO Win 98SE vs ME is very much like Win7 vs Win10.

-98SE and ME share the same basic kernel, just as 7 and 10 do.

-ME and 10 have an updated, "modern" interface. Win98 and 7 look very much like their predecessors.

-Parts of the OS that were easily accessible and made it more compatible with old software (real mode DOS in Win98; the ability to disable desktop composition in Win7) were removed in later versions.

-WinME usually boots up faster than Win98SE, just as Win10 usually boots up faster than Win7. Yet somehow, once the system is booted, the newer version seems to require more memory and CPU resources. WinME is more comfortable on a P2 with 128MB, whereas Win98SE is fine on a P1 with 64MB. on my system, Win10 always uses a bit more RAM than Win7 to perform the same tasks. Win10 also tends to bench slightly lower.

-WinME and 10 both have some bizarre bugs that just don't effect any previous versions. For example, the issue in Win10 where the Start Menu just randomly stops working. Or in WinME, where selecting shut down occasionally results in the system displaying a black screen with a blinking cursor instead of actually turning off.

-This might be stretching it, but MS tried too hard to make ME and 10 cute and friendly. For ME, well, there was the product name itself. Windows for the me generation...ugh. The removal of scary old DOS to make it appear more user friendly. Windows 10 has this whole phone-friendly alter ego. It also has annoyingly friendly error messages: BSODs with emoticons. Use of the word "we" instead of "Windows" when describing problems. Edge browser's "the Web just isn't the same without you" error message. Win98SE and Win7 were dead serious and clearly focused on getting the job done without any extra fluff. Perfect!

ME has some nice features that are missing in 98SE. Off the top of my head:

- File Types are far easier to work with. Meaning you can change which programs open which file types much more easily.
- Plug & Play seems to work better than 98SE + nUSB, for example, I have an external MIDI module (Roland SC-7) connected to a USB-to-MIDI cable. WinME recognizes it properly and works flawlessly. Win98SE hangs if you install the default driver, I have not found a solution to this yet, other than grabbing a Gameport-To-MIDI cable.

Issues exclusive to one of my setups, K6-III+ and ASUS P5A-B.

-P5A-B's latest BIOS that supports the K6+ CPUs properly is ACPI enabled. 98SE installs ACPI by default, but always hangs before proper shutdown. Everyone online suggests installing APM instead, which works properly indeed.
WinME installs ACPI and... it works perfectly! I've tried to transplant related files between the two, but only managed to wreck the system.

-Ali Aladdin V boards have an interesting bug with nUSB and 98SE. Specifically, if you boot your system with a USB flash drive plugged in, the system automatically assigns Drive Letter D: to the flash drive, usually giving your optical drive the Drive Letter E: or whichever is available. So, you either have to avoid it or go and change the drive letters through the Device Manager, which requires a reboot.

It's the small things that win you over with ME. I just wish DOS worked properly, it's such a lame decision they had. And they went all the way with it, they should have kept some sort of backdoor method to access DOS-Mode and start reusing Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. It truly would have made our lives easier 😁.

MS has been trying forever to make PC-computing less "nerdy" and more for, say, the n00b masses and ME was just one of the steps they took to go that way. ME took the 2k "modern" interface, not the other way around.

Btw, that shutdown thingy, that was more a 98SE thing "it is ok to shut down bla bla".

But I remember that when ME was released, I indeed kinda thought MS was trying to make ME "the next best thing since sliced bread" ...as they did with XP after this and with Vista this was very obvious.

F2bnp wrote:

ME has some nice features that are missing in 98SE. Off the top of my head: […]
Show full quote

ME has some nice features that are missing in 98SE. Off the top of my head:

- File Types are far easier to work with. Meaning you can change which programs open which file types much more easily.
- Plug & Play seems to work better than 98SE + nUSB, for example, I have an external MIDI module (Roland SC-7) connected to a USB-to-MIDI cable. WinME recognizes it properly and works flawlessly. Win98SE hangs if you install the default driver, I have not found a solution to this yet, other than grabbing a Gameport-To-MIDI cable.

Issues exclusive to one of my setups, K6-III+ and ASUS P5A-B.

-P5A-B's latest BIOS that supports the K6+ CPUs properly is ACPI enabled. 98SE installs ACPI by default, but always hangs before proper shutdown. Everyone online suggests installing APM instead, which works properly indeed.
WinME installs ACPI and... it works perfectly! I've tried to transplant related files between the two, but only managed to wreck the system.

-Ali Aladdin V boards have an interesting bug with nUSB and 98SE. Specifically, if you boot your system with a USB flash drive plugged in, the system automatically assigns Drive Letter D: to the flash drive, usually giving your optical drive the Drive Letter E: or whichever is available. So, you either have to avoid it or go and change the drive letters through the Device Manager, which requires a reboot.

It's the small things that win you over with ME. I just wish DOS worked properly, it's such a lame decision they had. And they went all the way with it, they should have kept some sort of backdoor method to access DOS-Mode and start reusing Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. It truly would have made our lives easier 😁.

My 2 most favorite features are actually the standard USB storage driver (has never actually failed me) and the integrated compressed folders.

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, that shutdown thingy, that was more a 98SE thing "it is ok to shut down bla bla".

This is not a 98SE thing. It's an AT thing. AT PSUs have a switch that stays on once you push it. The computer has no way to turn itself off if you don't cut the power off. 🤣

F2bnp wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, that shutdown thingy, that was more a 98SE thing "it is ok to shut down bla bla".

This is not a 98SE thing. It's an AT thing. AT PSUs have a switch that stays on once you push it. The computer has no way to turn itself off if you don't cut the power off. 🤣

Ah ok. I was thinking these were 2 separate issues 😊

Tetrium wrote:

F2bnp wrote:

Tetrium wrote:

Btw, that shutdown thingy, that was more a 98SE thing "it is ok to shut down bla bla".

This is not a 98SE thing. It's an AT thing. AT PSUs have a switch that stays on once you push it. The computer has no way to turn itself off if you don't cut the power off. 🤣

Ah ok. I was thinking these were 2 separate issues 😊

The machine I tried ME on back in the day was not an AT. It was a PIII-550/ATX, and it never had problems shutting down with 98SE (and later 2K). It was only with WinME that, instead of turning off the PSU, it would occasionally just display a blinking cursor after the OS finished closing.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

The machine I tried ME on back in the day was not an AT. It was a PIII-550/ATX, and it never had problems shutting down with 98SE (and later 2K). It was only with WinME that, instead of turning off the PSU, it would occasionally just display a blinking cursor after the OS finished closing.

Odd. But anyhow, if it's just a blinking cursor and not some fatal crash thingy, I wouldn't really be bothered about it anyway, ME usually shuts down so fast, I wouldn't even have time to walk away and having to walk back a few seconds later to remove the power from the system so it can really shut down.

The blinking cursor thing happens on my WinME box as well. I guess the image stating Windows is shutting down didn't actually make it into Windows ME, so it simply shows a blinking cursor instead.

Since ACPI is disabled on my machine (to free up IRQs) and I'm using an older APM style setup, I do see the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" message, just a second before the computer powers off on its own.

mattrock1988 wrote:

The blinking cursor thing happens on my WinME box as well. I guess the image stating Windows is shutting down didn't actually make it into Windows ME, so it simply shows a blinking cursor instead.

Since ACPI is disabled on my machine (to free up IRQs) and I'm using an older APM style setup, I do see the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" message, just a second before the computer powers off on its own.

I'm not sure, but I thought ME actually did have such a splash screen (don't take my word for it though, been years since I last dug through those files). I do know for sure the ME welcome screen can be changed (I changed it to some cheap paint I made containing something like "Welcome to DOS 8.00" or so).

Me definitely still has the "It's now safe to turn off your computer" screen. The blinking cursor is probably from a failed attempt at a "quick shutdown"

On my newly acquired Gateway Athlon PC which has ME installed on it, I booted up to the log-in screen asking for the password -- none of my guesses let me in, but I didn't expect otherwise...

But a few minutes later the PC detected that my Microsoft Mouse was new and then asked if I wanted to search for a driver. I said OK and a few clicks later it let me into the system. SCARY that I got into this PC and I wasn't even trying! 😲

The first thing this PC did was start up AOL and I have no care to look through other people's stuff. So time to wipe it. 😀

Tetrium wrote:

I'd personally have doubts about ME or XP when things start getting into the GHz range, but these days imo this range is actually climbing upwards a bit (XP on a 1GHz Coppermine with 512MB RAM wasn't very fast and ME was a rocket on similar hardware) and I'd mostly install XP over ME once the amount of RAM is 1GB or more.
2k I wouldn't personally use a lot, unless I needed it for some reason and XP would run too slow for my tastes (but I'd give 2k a lot more extra minimum RAM, like 384MB or more and preferably a CPU a tad faster than what I'd consider for ME)

I'm having somewhat of a similar experience with XP after installing the ryanvm SP4 on my 5750 vs. 2k on that same hardware, XP's lagging a bit, particularly when booting up, I place maybe 1/3 of the blame on the hard drive being used, 5400rpm vs. the pre-fail 7200rpm it's replacing, but it's reasonably quick once it's booted, while 2k was a rocket and a beast on that same hardware, however XP's compatibility trumps 2k's.

ME and back to win95 can be configured so when user choose to "shutdown windows" its actually return to MS-DOS command prompt, just like how it was with win3x.
You can even type "win" to soft-restart windows without rebooting the box.

Appologies for bumping an old thread but I'd like to say a few things about Windows Me.
Windows Me had a whole parody of an anime character called Me Chan the OS tan and that was because of BSOD's and other things Me was capable of.
However that never happened to me.
It seemed although Me was useful with 98se drivers, the hardware designed for 98SE wasn't really larger footprint compatIble and lots of its users used worn out old latE 90's machines with poultry specs. Also people didn't match recommended system xms spec including AGP GPU arpeture recommended requirements.
Given 256mb xms for the os (forget the 128mb hype) and then add double the GPU memory and add that to xms so 128mb agp add 256mb xms making 512mb total this gave the least likelyhood of BSOD.
I disagree 98SE and Me share the same kerne as Me doesn't leak as much memory over time and handles larger memory capacity better.
Disable system file protection and system restore turned around the fabled slower than 98se and added a few extra points above in benchmarks.
Conservative swapfile switch and a more modern higher capacity hard disk (up to 128gb) this makes things very interesting without limitations of stock 98se.
like out of the box HD Audio support that 98se needed patching for and no memory errors about scandisk and defrag.
With sufficient public released patches (by rudolph loew) I run Millennium on 2gb system RAM, 256mb AGP 8X GPU in 4x mode, a 500gb boot partiton, and it boots faster and runs better on my stuff for games such as monster truck madness 2, with usb analogue controllers emulating playstation 1 is fun and lots of mame arcade stuff. DOS mode patch allows running games in dos but I just have a boot menu now to dual boot 98se dos or Millennium OS.
So I've just upgraded to SATA150 by PCI card and now have 4 x 250 GB disks running RAID to boot fat32 thanks to partitoning and formating done on anther boot disk running XP the utility was a 2tb fat32 max app. I haven't got anything to boot this fast its just a blink of the eye.
I include screens with RPconfig taskbar views to see how Millennium can look today for the 9x retro enthusiast.

Windows Me had a whole parody of an anime character

They all had. Including Windows 3.1.

The Serpent Rider wrote on 2021-08-13, 19:03:

Windows Me had a whole parody of an anime character

They all had. Including Windows 3.1.

Yes true but they came later 🤣

zapbuzz wrote on 2021-08-13, 18:23:

Windows Me had a whole parody of an anime character called Me Chan

Yeah, well, Windows 7 had a 1000 calorie Whopper. 😜

I think a lot of the difference between using ME now vs. Then is that back then, we were using it daily to do regular everyday things, including internet access, back when ME would have been a target for viruses/malware/hacking, and when it was a mainstream O/S with new software targeted at it.

One thing I remember about the late 1990's was that was still when Microsoft was whining about older hardware not having enough "power" to do what they wanted with their O/S, and other software manufacturers did the same thing, because a Pentium-Pentium III truly did not have enough power for the kind of end user experience we have today. It was this push to make things prettier and easier to use, and so we got software that then was considered "bloated" running on too little RAM, too little disk space, and slower interfaces.

Today, some of us running that here, from the specs I read on this forum, are running liteal DREAM machines of that time. ATA-133 120GB HDD's with virtualized ISOs and 3D Graphics with as much RAM as the computer itself has. When most teenagers at the time were running Red Alert or Quake at reduced graphics settings and/or off a CD, today were running those games off of ultra-fast, sometimes solid-state storage, at maximum resolution and detail on the same system because so much more can either be coaxed or afforded. This carries over to Windows Me, which has room to stretch out, and needs less time to wait on the hard drive or an executable in memory to toss back some bits to some other process. Also, we don't have newbies in our lives anymore installing Bonzi Buddy, downloading illegal software and malware from wares and adult sites, and insisting on installking Kazaa or Limewire.

Honestly, even versions of Windows I used to condemn, like ME, 95, Vista even to an extent - are not as bad as they were in their day. I remember even whining about 3.1x because I used to get problems with it yearly that lead to a R&R (reformat and reinstall) of DOS and WIndows For Workgroups. And for those of us who still have issues - it's less of an issue, it's so much easier today to drag and drop an entire working install and then SYS C:\ on a CF Card or removable HDD than it was back in 1999 when a CF Card cost $150 for 32MB and a HDD cost $120 for 10GB. Even today, Windows 95 is a well liked platform in my household, when only 10 years ago I would have said "F*** 95! It crashes and hangs - 98 SE all day long!".

And 98 SE, it's even better than it was too for the same reasons. My ready 9522 that runs it just laughs at it - but it's a Pentium 1 with 128MB of RAM and 256K L2 Cache.....if only I had a better graphics card, that thing would be a total weapon of a retro-gaming rig. 1MB Alliance is not for the faint of heart.

The minuscule "minimum" requirement on the box to run an OS with gui was absolutely laughable back then.