Jo22 wrote on 2023-06-08, 18:06:

In my country, OEM versions were freely sold without hardware, with the only downside being that Microsoft refused to provide support.
So it was an unpleasant surprise that OEM versions of Windows could suddenly be dongled.

That's really weird, but I guess entirely possible. In the states, it was possible to buy OEM copies of Windows in certain retail outlets with a hardware purchase. I never did that, because, you could just walk to the shelf on the right day, and pick up a retail boxed copy of Windows ME for $20 for example. But I don't think anyone actually shopped for an OEM version bundled inside a box. The store had generic OEM copies that couldn't practically be locked, because they sold hardware from dozens of companies, and so how could a vendor really get away with something like that? Only the cheapest of cheap. But let's assume in the stores over there an actual motherboard hardware vendor actually licensed ME from Microsoft directly and included a disk they made directly in the shrinkwrap box. I guess they could?? It's nasty they'd BIOS lock it. I suppose that would leave a bad impression on any clueless consumer, if this happened. But the ultimate dongling came in the form of WinXP.

I've not used ME when it came out, but I have been using it instead of W98 for some time now for my late 90's builds and I had 0 issues.

I like it mainly because USB storage works right out of the box. On Some P3 and Athlon VIA chipsets, I Could not get USB storage working with 98 at all with nusb33. The lack of DOS mode also doesn't bother me much as I don't really have any DOS games don't run fine straight from Windows.

I think all the issues came down to bad driver support, kind of like Vista, which also runs great on the machines I built recently.

everything i see and read about Windows ME makes me think i wouldn't have liked it back then but i would appreciate it now

perhaps simply due to DOS within 95/98 compared to ME, now there are many options

makes me want to have an ME build 😀

the3dfxdude wrote on 2023-06-08, 19:07:

Jo22 wrote on 2023-06-08, 18:06:

In my country, OEM versions were freely sold without hardware, with the only downside being that Microsoft refused to provide support.
So it was an unpleasant surprise that OEM versions of Windows could suddenly be dongled.

That's really weird, but I guess entirely possible. In the states, it was possible to buy OEM copies of Windows in certain retail outlets with a hardware purchase. I never did that, because, you could just walk to the shelf on the right day, and pick up a retail boxed copy of Windows ME for $20 for example. But I don't think anyone actually shopped for an OEM version bundled inside a box. The store had generic OEM copies that couldn't practically be locked, because they sold hardware from dozens of companies, and so how could a vendor really get away with something like that? Only the cheapest of cheap. But let's assume in the stores over there an actual motherboard hardware vendor actually licensed ME from Microsoft directly and included a disk they made directly in the shrinkwrap box. I guess they could?? It's nasty they'd BIOS lock it. I suppose that would leave a bad impression on any clueless consumer, if this happened. But the ultimate dongling came in the form of WinXP.

Yes, the legal thing was a bit complicated at the detail.
In essence, here you were allowed to sell a piece of software that was originally bundled with the PC you bought.
Or, the seller itself could sell the software and hardware independently.
Microsoft had nothing to say what happens with the software after it was sold first time.
The EULA clause of the time was essentially violating national law and could be ignored.

https://www.heise.de/news/Microsoft-muss-im-O … cken-29554.html

Englisch Translation

I didn't have bad luck with drivers on ME personally, but... I used then-recent creative / 3dfx / nvidia / powervr hardware when I did 😀 🙁

I was long over booting into pure DOS for specific picky dos games by that point in 2000 I just didn't give a shit because I wanted to play *new* games. The DOS loss was irrelevant

My main beef with Me's just what it does with a GPF and it instantly shuts down before you could catch it, and the recovery feature zapping .exes even if they weren't installed programs (turning off System Restore is the first thing I do on a fresh ME install)

I like ME. I like the style of icons used for it and 2000 the best.

The only issue I had with it recently was that it installed the wrong driver for default for one of my sound cards, I think my Santa Cruz. The driver wouldn't let the system boot once it initialized.

For me, it's smarter to dual boot DOS and ME rather than just run Win98.

I started out upgrading my (rather unstable) Win98FE install with a fresh install of WinME and even though I did have some issues with it, the issues were way fewer than with 98FE and to a large degree stemmed from my inexperience with using a PC and using Windows (it was my first PC, even though I had used other PCs with other OSes). It was when I started learning how to build PCs and since WinME was literally the only real option I had at the time (I didn't own any 98SE install media and I didn't want to use 98FE or 95 instead of ME) I just made the best of it.

It worked pretty much just fine with the (few) DOS games I played on these WinME rigs and I learned to tweak ME to run rather well.
I did hear about all the abd rep ME got, but I just explained that I never really experienced this. I also felt quite strongly that to many people who think WinME is just plain bad, most have no idea what they are talking about, they just lemming that ME is bad because 'everybody else' thinks that so that they can have a laugh together and bask in being stupid together.

I also disabled system restore and also pc health and did a number of other tweaks. I at some point developed a PC building routine and it seemed to really make using WinME rather painless (I wrote a guide years ago which kinda explains).

At some point I (finally!) managed to get an original 98SE install disk! I had to try it out! And I was disappointed...

The DOS thing really doesn't matter much if you play contemporary games which you would play on a PC that had WinME installed and usually the DOS games I did play just ran fine without having real DOS mode.
And the mass storage drivers out of the box made it really convenient to build new PCs as I didn't have to bother with installing as many drivers from a CDR or perhaps a floppy (I used 2.88MB floppy disks and drives for this, but it was still much more limited than just using USB ZIP 250MB) or by having to copy the files over from another disk mounted internally which was just a lot of extra hassle that I found easy to prevent by just sticking with WinME.

Why it got a bad rep? I think part because of crummy prebuilds, poor tweaking by end users, poor driver support (or poor use of existing drivers by users because of lack of proper knowledge we do have now) and hyped expectations. At the time I was not at all savvy and I had no idea what 2000 and ME even really were at the time. We had NT3.51, NT4, 2000, 98SE, 98FE, 95OSR whatever (and the list goes on for a bit) all in a span of like just 5 years or so.

People who these days still think WinME is just a steaming pile of crap are really ignorant or should just get their lemmingtrainmemeaddiction out of their systems and instead just get back to the real world.

And regardless of which OS anyone prefers, be happy we have so much choice nowadays (even though most (not all but most) people will probably skip NT4 and before and skip 95 these days).

I ended up using mostly WinME and WinXP on my retro rigs and both needed to be tweaked before they ran well.

I've always loved Vista, even though it has high requirements, I think its graphical interface is incredible, and I've always hated people saying "garbage vista, seven wonderful", that's completely stupid, because seven is just a vista service pack 3, but with a theme Modified for marketing reasons. But I always had to love him in secret, because my opinion went against the majority. Now that vista has become obsolete and is used in some retro rigs, my opinion is a bit more acceptable.

This leads me to believe that the same thing happened with ME (I used ME for the first time in 2003, because my father gave me a computer, and he decided to format it with ME because it was the latest update available to install on a Pentium 166mhz)

I never had an issue with ME when used with hardware that had drivers for it. Any of the W9x/ME versions can be unstable as hell with bad drivers.

To be honest when I could play games on Win2k I ditched 9x/me altogether.

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-08, 22:02:

I've always loved Vista, even though it has high requirements, I think its graphical interface is incredible, and I've always hated people saying "garbage vista, seven wonderful", that's completely stupid, because seven is just a vista service pack 3, but with a theme Modified for marketing reasons. But I always had to love him in secret, because my opinion went against the majority. Now that vista has become obsolete and is used in some retro rigs, my opinion is a bit more acceptable.

Yep, all of the initial issues that were in Windows Vista were fixed by the time SP1 was released. Sadly, many people didn't notice the improvements and how similar it was to Windows 7 because of colored perceptions that are still present to this day.

A little offtopic: Why NT versions couldn't run dos games? Was the NTVDM bad? I don't understand, how XP (at least revision 2600) can run them, but 2k, or NT4 can't. I remember some games not running on ME either, but running on 98se, and it had nothing to do with the lack of that msdos mode during boot

Gmlb256 wrote on 2023-06-08, 22:29:

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-08, 22:02:

I've always loved Vista, even though it has high requirements, I think its graphical interface is incredible, and I've always hated people saying "garbage vista, seven wonderful", that's completely stupid, because seven is just a vista service pack 3, but with a theme Modified for marketing reasons. But I always had to love him in secret, because my opinion went against the majority. Now that vista has become obsolete and is used in some retro rigs, my opinion is a bit more acceptable.

Yep, all of the initial issues that were in Windows Vista were fixed by the time SP1 was released. Sadly, many people didn't notice the improvements and how similar it was to Windows 7 because of colored perceptions that are still present to this day.

Some people didn't like XP either until SP3 rolled around. it takes some time for a new OS to work out the bugs.

I skipped from XP to Win7 and from Win 7 to 10 because I like what works until it no longer does. Years later I do have a Vista gaming machine and it's not bad (with all the updates).

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-08, 23:14:

A little offtopic: Why NT versions couldn't run dos games? Was the NTVDM bad? I don't understand, how XP (at least revision 2600) can run them, but 2k, or NT4 can't. I remember some games not running on ME either, but running on 98se, and it had nothing to do with the lack of that msdos mode during boot

Probably something to do with direct hardware access that games could assume under DOS.

Rikintosh wrote on 2023-06-08, 23:14:

A little offtopic: Why NT versions couldn't run dos games? Was the NTVDM bad? I don't understand, how XP (at least revision 2600) can run them, but 2k, or NT4 can't. I remember some games not running on ME either, but running on 98se, and it had nothing to do with the lack of that msdos mode during boot

NTVDM relied on some kernel/system related APIs. Earlier Windows versions lacked some of the APIs necessary for certain old programs to correctly run in NTVDM.

I had experiments with NT 3.51 and I noticed that Exile 1 and 2 cannot run with its NTVDM, only Exile 3 and Blades of Exile worked. With later Windows such as Win2K these games start fine. And by the way, these are Win3.x games, not for DOS.

Perhaps with WinXP NTVDM has grown mature enough to run a good amount of software without major issues, be it for DOS or Win3.x, only bound by its limitations, thanks to the new APIs provided by the kernel/system.

2 main reasons for me.
No booting into dos mode. Yes work arounds exist but just like Windows 8 Start Menu, why do I have to do work arounds for issues that didn't exist on the previous version.
WinME was proven at the time of release to boot quicker but was actually slower at running things, not by much but again I'd rather a slower boot and have an extra fps in a game.
And really WinME didn't really offer me any benefits over 98 both of which was my gaming OS. For serious work I was using 2000.

I think WinME can be a good choice today if your doing a pure Win9x gaming rig but it lacks any nostalgic feeling so still go with 98

WinMe is practically useless now, due to community effort to patch 98SE. So practically everything it does is worse than 98.

Not really. With WinME you don't have to use that unstable patchwork 'service pack' 😀

Did Me get any later official patches than 98 which was in 2004.

The reality is Me is probably fine for a late 98 era build, but untouchable for a Win 95 era pc where real mode dos games are still expected to be supprted.

I use WinME in a lot of my machines, i installed all kind of peripherals, drivers etc. it's as stable as any other M$ OS, it's useful for a period correct build but don't expect to use it for DOS, it's made for windows applications and it works really well for it, i think ME is hated because of expectations both at the time and now when building a retro system that does it all.

Also i used it a lot before switching to XP at the time, so i used it for softwares not related to games and it worked just fine, personally i think it doesn't deserve the horrible reputation.

kolderman wrote on 2023-06-09, 11:57:

Did Me get any later official patches than 98 which was in 2004.

Windows 98 and Me had official patches until 2006, where support for both ended at the same time.

Those unofficial "service packs" for Windows 98 have all of these patches but has all that third-party cruft that some of us here didn't like.