BSA Starfire wrote:

jesolo wrote:

Co-developed with Microsoft until IBM and Microsoft decided to part ways around 1990, when Windows 3.0 proved more popular (ther […]
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BSA Starfire wrote:

OS/2 was a IBM OS not Microsoft.

Co-developed with Microsoft until IBM and Microsoft decided to part ways around 1990, when Windows 3.0 proved more popular (there were various other reasons).
OS/2 was originally going to be the operating system for the future.
A large portion of the code in OS/2 was written by Microsoft and was also used in Windows NT. Hence, why IBM has never released the source code for OS/2 and is unlikely to do so.
But, I'm now diverting from the main topic here.

That's interesting, one of the things I love about this forum, you learn something new everyday!

There's a pretty neat blog called OS2Museum.com - these days he mainly blogs about Marvin-related things but some of his earliest posts are about OS/2 history and some of the things learned from the various leaked betas of OS/2, etc. Who knows, you may like it. 😉

FaSMaN wrote:

The biggest problem tho is that it lacks native dos support without lots of patching, and I think thats why its still dreaded for retro enthusiasts, but lets be honest, today we are spoiled for choice, PLOP Boot manager lets you run 6.11 and ME perfectly , so I see this as a non-issue.

PLoP is an awesome boot manager. Love the starfield animated background too. 😀

"That's interesting, one of the things I love about this forum, you learn something new everyday!"
MS was using OS/2 as the NT development enviroment until 1993.

Sorry for the res, but I just had to add my €0,02 here.

I'll not start quoting all of the replies which have similar good experiences with ME, but I've had virtually all of these experiences myself.

I started out with a Pentium 2 with 98FE and it was almost impossible to actually do a lot of anything without it misbehaving up to the point I started suspecting my hardware might be broken somehow (I only ever had this pc back then, Iwazzan00b! 😁).

I really wanted something else (I basically wanted anything else!), but 98SE and 2k were very difficult to find and I somehow decided to buy some OEM ME still shrinkwrapped for €15 or so, installed this and even though it still had problems, it was one heck of an improvement over 98FE for me.
Later I learned to tweak it, but not by much as I was kinda paranoid about possibly loosing all of my data and I figured I would be better off doing all of my experimenting on another rig...which I didn't have at the time and this is actually one of the things that eventually evolved in me getting into (then not so very) retro rigs in the first place! 😁

I got some other spare hardware and eventually started completing more and more rigs and I learned to tweak ME, which was actually not a very hard thing to do (easily done in under an hour at a relaxed pace).

I ended up installing ME on dozens of rigs, ranging from mostly ss7 to Tualatin and Thunderbird (possibly also a lone s7 and also Athlon XP and Netburst, but those latter ones were probably not my own rigs) and all of the stuff I had heard about ME being so terrible...I wasn't seeing it! I heard and read about all the crashes I never experienced. I really didn't understand what all the bad rep for ME was about, it's even easier to manually tweak and get running than 98SE is if you ask me (Once I finally got 98SE, 98SE was really a big letdown as I expected 98SE to actually be an improvement...which in my experience it was not).

After having ME as my main OS on almost all of my rigs for years (I only finally got XP when Vista got released 🤣) I can say that ME is really as good as any 9x OS can get.

But one can't deny it's not the best 9x OS in everything. Even though I did play DOS games on ME (not using real DOS) and with mostly PCI sound cards, these mostly worked just fine (or at least to me, as an average user) but as I never had a DOS computer to call my own and knowing from other users here who were (and most often probably are) more savvy using DOS stuff, that DOS in 98SE is simply an improved experience compared to ME.

And some things in ME one really can go better without (like the system restore thing and a few other settings), just disable that extra crashy stuff ME has and 98SE lacks out of the box and it'll mostly be a harmless experience from there....for 9x that is.

But it is also true ME does eat a bit more memory compared to 98SE and a tad faster CPU will help when using rigs based on, say, pre-300MHz systems.

I'd personally use ME when theres more than 64MB RAM (cacheable) and the CPU is maybe 200MHz or so, but my recommended minimum specs would be to give ME a 266MHz CPU (K6-II should be enough) and 128MB RAM.
400MHz and 192MB RAM ran really well and very fast! (particularly booting and shutting down).
When it comes to the rest of the hardware, I'd perhaps recommend using ME when theres no ISA sound card (I'd perhaps personally prefer 98SE for rigs build around ISA sound and ME for PCI sound). Graphics cards seemed to run ME just fine, even Virge wasn't a problem iirc.

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)

Fascinating post! I guess you had got a good Win Me experience because you where one of the
few who actually installed it correctly.

Part of ME's bad reputation was caused by fact it mainly shipped as an upgrade and people installed it
on top of an earlier, possibly broken installation (it was also available as a stand alone version).
For example, I've seen OEM bundles were both Win98SE and ME were included.

And now let's imagine in which order users threw in these installation CDs..

I assume only a few knew it was possible to do a clean installation even with an upgrade disc:
Simply boot from Win98 or Me CD, insert the Me CD and execute D:\WIN9X\Setup.exe.
A little bit later you're then asked for a genuine Win3.1/95/98 medium (depending on the Me edition).
Ok, it wasn't always that easy. Some versions also demanded a clean hard disc (no boot sector/system files).

And as far as I am concerned, I can relate to quite some of these things you said.
Like you, I never really saw the need for that DOS mode. Maybe this was because I was an 286 user most of
time in the 90s and I did not have many DOS4/GW games or programs which required this.
And the few protected-mode games which I had got where running not that well on my dads 386 anyway,
so I was avoiding that type of games whenever possible (I also had a SNES with several good games, so this was no problem for me).
Even more, the whole 32Bit flat-mode craze was something I've never really understood!
To me, 32Bit computing was synonymical to slowness.
I'm serious about this - as a Windows 3.1 user I've always wondered what all that fuss was about.
My 16bit system was running quicker and more stable than more powerful computer systems I've seen at the time.
However, I was no power user running 10 applications simultaneously nor did I use 386 enchanted mode.
And by the time Win98SE was around the corner, I had no real need for DOS stuff on my main PC anymore.
The few things I did in DOS where running on my dads old 386 or computers from the waste disposal site.
Later I've also found several computers at the roadside which were great toys to play around with.
I've installed DOS, OS/2, Win98 and other OSes on them. And also Linux, because that was the kind of "good hardware" you needed for it. 😉

Jo22 wrote:

Fascinating post! I guess you had got a good Win Me experience because you where one of the few who actually installed it correc […]
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Fascinating post! I guess you had got a good Win Me experience because you where one of the
few who actually installed it correctly.

Part of ME's bad reputation was caused by fact it mainly shipped as an upgrade and people installed it
on top of an earlier, possibly broken installation (it was also available as a stand alone version).
For example, I've seen OEM bundles were both Win98SE and ME were included.

And now let's imagine in which order users threw in these installation CDs..

I assume only a few knew it was possible to do a clean installation even with an upgrade disc:
Simply boot from Win98 or Me CD, insert the Me CD and execute D:\WIN9X\Setup.exe.
A little bit later you're then asked for a genuine Win3.1/95/98 medium (depending on the Me edition).
Ok, it wasn't always that easy. Some versions also demanded a clean hard disc (no boot sector/system files).

And as far as I am concerned, I can relate to quite some of these things you said.
Like you, I never really saw the need for that DOS mode. Maybe this was because I was an 286 user most of
time in the 90s and I did not have many DOS4/GW games or programs which required this.
And the few protected-mode games which I had got where running not that well on my dads 386 anyway,
so I was avoiding that type of games whenever possible (I also had a SNES with several good games, so this was no problem for me).
Even more, the whole 32Bit flat-mode craze was something I've never really understood!
To me, 32Bit computing was synonymical to slowness.
I'm serious about this - as a Windows 3.1 user I've always wondered what all that fuss was about.
My 16bit system was running quicker and more stable than more powerful computer systems I've seen at the time.
However, I was no power user running 10 applications simultaneously nor did I use 386 enchanted mode.
And by the time Win98SE was around the corner, I had no real need for DOS stuff on my main PC anymore.
The few things I did in DOS where running on my dads old 386 or computers from the waste disposal site.
Later I've also found several computers at the roadside which were great toys to play around with.
I've installed DOS, OS/2, Win98 and other OSes on them. And also Linux, because that was the kind of "good hardware" you needed for it. 😉

Cheers 😁

This could very well be the case. It probably helped that I decided it was best to do clean installs whenever possible and the one single time I had to resort to doing an upgrade (w2k over 98SE) was because I could for the life of me NOT get that w2k disk to boot. And that I was very anxious to try out this awesome 2k stuff everyone was so raving about.

2k was really a fine OS, no doubts about that, but for whatever reason it was never really an upgrade to what I needed at the time (mostly because it was slower and ME's "instability" wasn't really an issue to me anyway).

I actually figured out I could do an upgrade without having to actually install another OS first a couple years after I got into computers and I think it's good that this option exists.

I remember all the rave about 32-bit gaming. I tested out my awesome Viper 550 and the 32-bit performance was really...quite abysmal 🤣

And on top of that, I could barely notice the difference between 16-bit and 32-bit anyway, especially in the midst of a firefight of alarge battles, 32-bit was way less of a concern than framerate was, so I ended up playing all of my games in 16-bit.

Even now I tend to prefer lower settings to higher-but-slower settings, even if the difference is only noticeable in the largest killfrenzies.

If it adds anything without frustrating gameplay, then I'm all for it. But I play games for the fun and if I wanted to look at pretty pictures, I'll just go watch some brand new SF movie or watch gamethroughs on youtube or something 😜.

Perhaps someone here should write a guide to optimizing ME?
I at some point even made a ZIP disk which was packed with all the necessary files and tweaks I needed to get ME running swell 😀

edit: I suppose I should do it 🤣!
But feel free to chime in! 😁

edit2: I quickly found both the ZIP disk containing all the stuff and tweaks I used for all my new ME rigs and that extremely versatile and visually pleasing USB 250MB ZIP drive I used at the time. I'm actually gonna go through with this 🤣!
Will post a link here once the first revision of this mini-guide is done 😀.

My first attempt is here Tetrium's guide to Windows ME

It's still very very rough, but I figure it's a good start (though it could've been better I admit 😊 ).

So, I beta tested Windows ME back in the day. I agree that it's not near as bad as everyone made it out to be (outside of some buggy drivers to start out with which were smoothed out) but at the same time I never really saw what it did beyond Windows 98SE other then some updated drivers and removing of DOS mode.

In fact Vista really is the same story. It got a bad reputation at first if you patch it and make sure your using good drivers it is perfectly stable. But, I didn't see the need for it either.

Even Windows 8 kinda got a similar bad rap although it was more it's user interface that pissed people off more then it's stability.

Ultimately, as long as you aren't using failing hardware, or flaky drivers , or flaky software any version of Windows should do what it was intended to do just fine.

I never went back to Windows ME after Windows XP came out. But, this thread gives me the idea that I should. Thanks everyone!

Rhuwyn wrote:

Ultimately, as long as you aren't using failing hardware, or flaky drivers , or flaky software any version of Windows should do what it was intended to do just fine.

Except that any version of Windows does actually do things it's not supposed to do, or may even be considered a bug or a nuisance instead of an intended feature.

One little thing about Windows 7 is its habit to move down a list of files whenever I create a new file in a directory that already has many files, and I've made it a habit to press the left arrow key right after Windows 7 does this, so it re-focusses on the file in the list.

Another thing (and iirc XP kinda had the same problem ..err I mean "feature") is installing games in the "Programs" directory, making any changes to a game inside this directory resulted in all kinds of issues which made me make it a habit to never install any game in this particular directory or a similarly names directory on another partition.

Does ME have a hdd limit like 98?

Um, I think so. LBA48 isn't supported out of the box.
Just like Win2000 'til SP3 and XP 'til SP1.

"No DOS-based version of Windows (which includes everything from 1.0 to ME) supports 48-bit LBA natively,
you must use a driver from the interface manufacturer."

Windows 98SE and Large Hard Drives

No version of Windows 2000 comes with 48-bit LBA support, not SP4 or Rollup 1. I know this because I had a giant IDE HDD in my Win2000 desktop and that drive was not visible until I purposely installed the 48-bit LBA update, I think it's an official Microsoft update.

Cool, thanks 😀

notsofossil wrote:

that drive was not visible

actually it should be visible and let you do the write of death

The weaknesses of 2K without the advantages of 98. I can see why most people just skipped it back in the day.

Errius wrote:

The weaknesses of 2K without the advantages of 98. I can see why most people just skipped it back in the day.

What "weaknesses of 2K"?
2K is NT 5, and if it has any weaknesses, Me doesn't share them.

Or maybe you mean different shade of gray from 95/98 in default theme...

Azarien wrote:

What "weaknesses of 2K"? 2K is NT 5, and if it has any weaknesses, Me doesn't share them. […]
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Errius wrote:

The weaknesses of 2K without the advantages of 98. I can see why most people just skipped it back in the day.

What "weaknesses of 2K"?
2K is NT 5, and if it has any weaknesses, Me doesn't share them.

Or maybe you mean different shade of gray from 95/98 in default theme...

It's presence on the shelves was short lived anyway, so probably only a few people noticed its existence.
But thanks to media it's quite famous now. (^_^)

To a certain degree ME and 2k are like siblings, I'd say. Win ME borrowed several sys files from 2k, despite their different kernels.
Esp. a lot of 16/32bit mixed code was replaced by pure 32bit code. And that's not bad, I think.
Even though I like 16bit platforms, this makes somewhat sense from a developers point of view and if you want to create a more stable OS.
And let's don't forget it got some native support for USB pen drives, aswell. Even 98SE benefits from this (doesn't NUSB also use ME sys files ?)

Besides, 2k must have been a rock solid OS! Otherwise I can't think of a reason why professionals liked it so much..
Other than the missing Windows activation, of course. 😉

Jo22 wrote:

Even though I like 16bit platforms, this makes somewhat sense from a developers point of view and if you want to create a more stable OS.

In theory, yes, In practice, I am not certain it actually got any stabler. I've been setting WinMe up lazily for the past week and it has already started crashing. 😀

Jo22 wrote:

And let's don't forget it got some native support for USB pen drives, aswell. Even 98SE benefits from this (doesn't NUSB also use ME sys files ?)

Yes, it does.

Jo22 wrote:

Besides, 2k must have been a rock solid OS! Otherwise I can't think of a reason why professionals liked it so much..

It is. Just not so good for gaming/entertainment.

Jo22 wrote:

Besides, 2k must have been a rock solid OS! Otherwise I can't think of a reason why professionals liked it so much..

Yes, 2K isn't very far from XP, especially after all the service packs and updates.
There was no System Restore (introduced in Me), no eye candy and ClearType (introduced in XP) but architecturally 2K and XP are like Vista and 7.

dr_st wrote:

It is. Just not so good for gaming/entertainment.

Why not? XP era games should work. Older ones would display some stupid message like "this game cannot be run on NT" even if they worked if you managed to get past that.
DOS games were problematic, but that is true for XP as well.

Various media players and codecs also worked.