I bought another PII laptop with WinME installed, it has a ESS sound card and the WinME driver works good with legacy DOS-box support, I tried Prince of Persia and it works well compared with other win98 laptops with YMF754 or CS4624. Those two laptops have sound card & driver with legacy DOS-box support but Prince of Persia crash on playing first sound. I don't know if it's WinME or ESS card/driver but it works really good.

Best ever version for me and my Dell GX1 workstation in early 2000's
Stable as rock with my Matrox Mystique 4Mb PCI Rainbow Runner Edition for video capture/edit, plays DVD MPEG2 content thru Hollywood+ DVD-decoder, nice compatibility TV ATI TV Wonder.

Giving this a go on my Nforce2 system for obvious reasons. I have only had 2 big issues so far, neither game breaking and only one fault of my own.

ME setup installs a "Crystal Soundfusion" driver for my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, which causes a blue screen with a vnetbios.vxd (I don't recall exactly) before the setup is complete. Took me forever to figure it out. Windows 98 does not do this as it doesn't have a clue what the sound card is at setup. I didn't catch this when I first loaded ME because I had an Audigy 2ZS installed. After I broke ME with the next issue I will describe, I went to reinstall with the Santa Cruz (love the slim drivers) and got this blue screen over and over. I first assumed it was related to the Nvidia ethernet, because of the name of the file in error. That didn't make sense though as I had it enabled when I installed ME the first time. Disabling the NIC also didn't fix it. I removed the Santa Cruz until Windows was fully setup, then I installed the card and rebooted. I canceled any prompts for driver install, then installed the proper driver from Turtle Beach. Good to go now.

The second problem is most likely my fault. I believe I may have inadvertently installed an Active Directory update intended for Windows 98, which broke the file sharing tab on folders. This lead me to reinstall ME, which caused me to spend hours in the Crystal audio nightmare.

On a positive spin, it runs MUCH better overall on my Nforce2 system than 98. ME doesn't complain about being setup with 1gb of RAM installed (I haven't tried 2gb during setup). I also don't get the issue with too fast of shutdown causing scandisk to trigger which is a major pet peeve of mine. I'd highly recommend it for any late 9x system that's overbuilt and not going to run native DOS due to sound issues or whatever. It doesn't hurt that I love the icon artwork of 2000/ME; they are my favorite icon sets of all Windows. I ran 2000 back in the day for as long as I could and ME is giving me a similar vibe now.

F2bnp wrote on 2016-05-27, 01:23:

-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.

That's not a bug of the board, that's how ALL win9x/Me and DOS versions work.

As soon as you insert another hard drive with additional partitions into the computer, the optical drives move one letter further if they previously came directly after the last partition.
This then led to many retail games no longer finding their CD-ROMs.

But there was a very simple solution to get around this problem. Once Windows 9x/Me was freshly installed, you simply had to manually assign a letter to the optical drives, which comes much further back in the alphabet. Only then did you install all the games.
I therefore always set my CD-ROM drive to X: and my CD burner to W:
If I then bought and connected an additional hard drive, which then perhaps had partitions E: and F:, there was no problem with the games because they looked for the CD-ROM on X:.

As far as I can remember, this problem no longer existed with the Windows NT series. Because here the type of device, hard drive vs. CD-ROM, does not determine the order in which the letter is assigned. So you could also give a hard drive a drive letter after the optical drive.

As far as the thread topic is concerned, I used Windows Millenium for many years. I switched to Windows XP in 2005 when I wanted to play Battlefield 2.
If you didn't need the DOS Real Mode, then it was a perfectly usable Win9x OS that received more bug fixes than its predecessors.
However, you should not use old VxD drivers with WinME. Windows Millennium clearly preferred the newer WDM drivers. And if you followed that, WinME ran relatively stable for a Win9X.

What was also better about WinMe than its predecessors was that it could unzip ZIP files out of the box. You didn't have to install any 3rd party software to do that.
Another advantage was the installer. There was something better about the graphics mode setting. Unfortunately I can't remember what it was exactly. Maybe using VESA at a higher resolution with more colors by default?

Exploit wrote on 2024-05-06, 17:41:

Another advantage was the installer. There was something better about the graphics mode setting. Unfortunately I can't remember what it was exactly. Maybe using VESA at a higher resolution with more colors by default?

That'd be the second stage after the first reboot where the detected graphics driver would be used. If it's a video card without a driver by this point, you won't get colors/intro video

mattrock1988 wrote on 2016-04-07, 09:42:

Dunno if I'm in a terribly tiny minority here on this site, but I really like Windows Me, despite the funny aura that surrounded […]
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Dunno if I'm in a terribly tiny minority here on this site, but I really like Windows Me, despite the funny aura that surrounded the OS for most of its life.

For the heck of it, I wiped my Windows 98SE drive, created two partitions for dual booting with PC-DOS 2000 (since Me doesn't have Real-mode DOS you can natively dump to), then installed Windows Me.

Aside from a *single* instance where I got the dreaded KERNEL32.DLL unhandled exception error, I haven't suffered any major crashes or slowdowns. In fact, Windows Me runs so well on my current rig, that it honestly beat my previous 98SE install, both in terms of stability and overall speed. Thus, I decided to keep the OS installed for the foreseeable future.

Does anyone else share my perspective? I'm also interested to see opposite opinions as well, so don't be shy. 😀

pretty late to this discussion but i have never had any issues with me.