RandomStranger wrote on 2022-06-12, 05:59:I think the MEs problems are:
Bad rep: back then a lot of people had issues with it.
Short time frame: When it came out 98SE was […]
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I think the MEs problems are:
Bad rep: back then a lot of people had issues with it.
Short time frame: When it came out 98SE was still relevant, 2000 was already out and XP was already on the horizon.
There aren't much to justify using it on an active build other than as a curiosity.
Those are problems from back then: these don't apply anymore.
The "Oh ha ha ME suXx!!111" jokes have been dead here for at least 10 years now. Still seeing this dogma pop up now and again is, if anything at all, just kinda disappointing really. There's lots of clever and interested people here on Vogons but sometimes there's this one individual popping up who apparently doesn't know any better, spamming a decades old meme again as though it's waiting for the round of applause from the echo chamber after having delivered to us this 'original' and ingenious but dogmatic punchline. Oh well.
Anyway, a Coppermine without any ISA slots is actually an excellent pick for an ME rig! 🙂
98SE on such hardware has no real advantages over ME anymore as its real strong point compared to ME is the native DOS support. And even then most more recent DOS games can be run from within Windows relatively fine even if the sound may not be the best. Windows XP on such configurations will typically be somewhat slow even if you NLited the install media to work more snappily on older systems.
ME loads faster and shuts down faster, has native ZIP support and native USB support and has better out-of-the-box support for contemporary hardware (though tbf these days this advantage isn't as essential as it was back when ME was still fairly new but it's an advantage nontheless), just to name a few of its advantages.
It's in a way Windows 98TE more centered on Windows instead of DOS. It having the same GUI as Win2k can also be seen as an advantage. Personally I like the ME/2k GUI 🙂
It's not inherently unstable (or at least not as far as any 9x can be considered stable) if you set it up properly, but setting it up correctly is definitely a new challenge since it requires a somewhat different approach from earlier versions of 9x Windows. But it's definitely not a difficult challenge once you know what to do and definitely not as tedious as NLiting XP is (or at least not for me but testing the XP install media in VPC got tedious after a while).
Also anecdotal evidence from several people here on Vogons suggest that ME may actually run more stable than 98SE on relatively new contemporary hardware (think s370, netburst and sA).
I think ME is a great pick for anything with, say, 400MHz and 128MB RAM and up, up to when WinXP starts to become a serious pick (which is anything that can run XP well without it feeling sluggish, usually from >=512MB RAM + (Northwood or AXP) and up and many people favor XP on much higher specced hardware than that even) and it's a great pick for a system that isn't centered around DOS.