Ask Slashdot: What Do You Remember About Windows ME? (computerworld.com) 269
"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system."
Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages.
But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?")
Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:
-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.
Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?
Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!"
Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments.
What do you remember about Windows ME?
But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?")
Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:
-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.
Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?
Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!"
Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments.
What do you remember about Windows ME?
System Restore? (Score:5, Funny)
"The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration" ... System Restore has never restored to a working configuration. No matter what you do with System Restore, you're left with a Windows system afterwards.
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Worst feature ever, since it gave people a false sense of security. "Nah, I
Re: System Restore? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Mac OS was always the best solution for internet use, for mul
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What kept windows around, and still does despite shitty operating systems over and over again (10 and 11 are no better), is their use with legacy software that businesses bought into.
Sometimes I think Microsoft has even started to forget this. However, there's a ton of software out there that's old and unmaintained, and/or simply too niche to care about broad platform support. All of this works on Windows.
Even if the software you use for most day-to-day things doesn't fit this category, you're eventually going to run into something that does.
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What kept windows around, and still does despite shitty operating systems over and over again (10 and 11 are no better), is their use with legacy software that businesses bought into. Fat client solutions like SAGE / MAS, Quickbooks, and the like, not to mention thousands and thousands of small-business industry specific implementations for things like dental x-rays and interfacing with odd machines that required a windows house of cards to run.
Yup. Shitty developers. I know of a business in my area (Fortune 500) that still runs Exchange 2000. They pay Microsoft boat-loads of cash for security and timezone updates every year. Why? Because they have a 1995-era machine with a very business-critical piece of software running on it that is tied to an old ISA card that interfaces with business-critical hardware that isn't made anymore. Replacing it will cost the company an estimated $3.2 million. They'd rather pay Microsoft tens of thousands per
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I always wonder about this. How many years does it take before you've spent more than the estimated cost to just replace the device? It's like no one learned anything from the Y2K issue. Companies keep running these legacy apps and then paying people obscene amounts of money to fix them when something goes wrong when they could just pay someone to create a new app in a more popular language, one where you could throw a rock and likely hit someone who knows it, that accepts the same inputs and provides the s
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Yeah cos what were they going to develop for back then? Linux? LOL
Actually, yes. The reason I know about the Exchange debacle is that my company developed a piece of software for them back in 2009. Apparently it's been running for them since then with no issues. They called me a few weeks ago because something wasn't working. I got access to the Linux server and dumped ~10 years of log files to free up disk space, and I'm assuming they'll be good for another 10 years.
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"What kept windows around, and still does despite shitty operating systems over and over again (10 and 11 are no better), is their use with legacy software that businesses bought into."
Oh stop lying to yourself.
The truth is that unlike Windows, Linux is you get what you pay for. With windows it's you're being ripped off but linux is a heaping pile of dung.
I am saying this as someone running ten-ish linux servers in the homelab, on the family computer and the media pc attached to the tv.
Yes, for me this part
So I'm on Windows for gaming (Score:3)
Now if you're somebody who likes t
Re:So I'm on Windows for gaming (Score:5, Insightful)
You should aim for a printer that's compatible with standards (postscript, pcl etc) irrespective of what OS you're using.
Even the oldest of postscript printers will still work on a modern OS. But printers which require proprietary drivers are a nightmare even with windows. The manufacturers will generally only produce drivers for the version of windows (and sometimes macos) current at the time the printer is being sold. A few years down the line and you're screwed. I have printers that will only work as far as win9x, or 32bit xp, or powerpc macos etc.
Re: System Restore? (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS was always the best solution for internet use, for multimedia consumption and content creation, as well as productivity suite.
No it wasn't. The first one is especially easy to disprove, because prior to OSX apple refused to support internet protocol, instead insisting that all they ever needed was appletalk. And if it was so good for productivity, it would have long dominated the business environment by now, but it hasn't.
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And if it was so good for productivity, it would have long dominated the business environment by now, but it hasn't.
That is a bit of a tough one. Modern era, it's definitely the best option out of the box. The only thing is, MS Office and LibreOffice(etc) exist. Why does it matter if macOS comes with productivity software when it's so easy to install on any other system as well?
Re: System Restore? (Score:5, Informative)
That's demonstrably false. The Mac OS had TCP/IP in 1988 via a commercial product; by 1994 it was a standard part of the operating system. And AppleTalk became TCP/IP compatible (i.e., the protocol could run over IP instead of its proprietary packet scheme) in the late 90s, years before OS X was released.
Re: System Restore? (Score:2, Informative)
Ummm... no. (Score:2)
"Mac OS was always the best solution for internet use, for multimedia consumption and content creation, as well as productivity suite."
No... that's what Mac OS users always touted it as being. I was in the thick of it for a couple of decades. I've had Macs continuously since 1992.
Whatever edge they had at any point in time was closed pretty quickly. The idea that the Mac was superior was one of the great marketing achievements of the 20th century. They managed a loop that, from the inside, was a wonderful t
Re: System Restore? (Score:5, Informative)
Many of the things you said are just plain wrong. You just don't know how to properly use macOS and you blame it for your lack of knowledge.
Those two options are available: save to a file on the desktop or save to the clipboard. You can even take full screenshots (the whole display) partial screenshots (you select the area you want) or a screenshot of a single window without having to post-process the screenshot to remove anything outside that selected window. So that's six ways to take a screenshot.
Wrong again. With Preview, which is a built-in macOS app, you can do basic markup on your screenshot (or any other image for that matter).
And wrong again once more. There's more than one way to switch between open windows on macOS. As you say, the Dock is one way, the usual Command+Tab works on macOS too (it's Control+Tab on Windows, but since the Command key on a Mac keyboard is at the same spot as the Control key on a Windows keyboard, it's the same muscle memory for the same task). Mission Control is another way, but as you say it shows you all opened windows which from your rant doesn't seem to be what you want) and there's "Application windows" to which you can bind a keyboard shortcut and/or a mouse button (with or without a modifier key), which does exactly what you want. Oh, and there's also [Command]+[Tilde] that only switches to other windows of the current application. So that's two ways to do something you seem to think is impossible to do on macOS.
TL;DR: Basically you hate macOS because you just never took the time to learn how it works.
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TL;DR: Basically you hate macOS because you just never took the time to learn how it works.
The amount of uninformed dislike in his postings is pretty bizzare. It's wildly innacurate. The screenshots are simple, switching between windows is pretty simple, like clicking in the desired window. Window sizes are saved, so once I size them as I like, the idea that a single click is a task so onerous tyhat it makes the OS inferior is just weird. And saving to the desktop versus clipboard is a Windows inferiority AFAIAC. Besides, the screenshot MacOS function also does videos - I can think of no reason t
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The problem is that when people move from one system to another, they try to use the new system in exactly the same way they used the old one. Which will usually either work poorly (due to some compatibility mechanism being implemented) or simply not work at all.
It's like driving a manual transmission car by leaving it in one gear. The car will move, but you're not going to get a very good experience.
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cut+paste seems to be working just fine on my macbook.. It can be performed with both keyboard shortcuts and the right click context menu. I have no idea what you're doing wrong if you're unable to use them.
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macOS screenshot to clipboard: cmd-ctrl-shift-4 (yes, awkward).
macOS markup screenshot: click on the popup after taking screenshot.
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Uhm, news flash, 90% of the population don't have gamer blah-blahs with fancy graphics cards.
What you really mean is, a gamer thing in 2000 on linux would be using generic, slow graphics drivers. That's it. Everything else normally worked fine.
Or if you bought some weird generic camera, you'd have to find a nerd to make it work. But not even 10% of users were using webcams...
Re: System Restore? (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you don't remember manually configuring XF86Config with monitor refresh and sync parameters, then. Or having to deal with ISA PNP cards that weren't PNP on Linux. Yes Linux pretty much worked just fine on most modern hardware at the time, but some assembly was required. We've come a long ways.
It (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:It (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but what I remember is that I want to forget it.
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That's you. I, on the other hand, celebrate it. Why, you ask? Well, when it comes to IT, sometimes you need a little help backing up your threats. To this end, MS has delivered. No one, and I repeat, no one has, to date, taken me up on my promise to upgrade their machine to Windows Me if they found their current situation unsatisfactory. It has cut down, dramatically, on the complaining, and the fighting.
And so, the Windows Me install media, complete with Certificate of Authority, collects dust in my desk d
Re:It (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, I really have to be thankful for Windows ME. It is the sole reason I've been using Linux as the main, and most of the time, only OS for the last 20+ years. If Microsoft had released XP instead of ME at that time, it is (just barely) within possibility that I would be mostly-Microsoft guy today.
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That's awesome. (Score:2)
When you have anesthetic during surgery, I expect you're asking for sulfuric ether. After all, that was way better than the standing alternative in 1846.
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Windows ME - Messy Edition (Score:4, Insightful)
The inability to run real mode DOS really caused trouble for me so I backed to 98.
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I remember (Score:5, Funny)
Having to reinstall it 3 times over the weekend instead of getting laid. It was her new laptop...
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Two heads and horns is just weird.
But she does have three tits. It's awesome.*
* my fellow nerds should recognize this joke.
I remember it as the OS (Score:4, Interesting)
I ignored in favor of 2000.
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I ignored in favor of 2000.
Yes. The number one thing that made Windows ME irrelevant was Windows 2000, which was much better.
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Yeah, I think that the reason that Windows ME gets bashed so hard is because they released Windows 2000 just a few months earlier. Windows 2000 was sooo much better! It had a stable Windows NT core, and Plug and Play hardware detection actually worked reliably for the first time. Windows ME just felt like warmed over/reskinned Windows 98 SE in comparison.
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I had Windows Me for a while, then decided after a while that it was just too unstable to use. I switched to 2000 soon after, even though it wasn't designated as a consumer OS. What a difference in stability there was, even with an occasional bluescreen due to buggy network drivers.
Other than that, I remember it as the only version of Windows I had contributed some code to. I did some contract work at Microsoft on one of the apps that shipped with Me. I... um.... left that off my resume, as you can prob
Re: I remember it as the OS (Score:2)
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Ditto. There was a perfectly cracked version of Windows 2000 easily available. The best OS Microsoft ever released.
No worse than 98se (Score:2)
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Same memories here:
1.) used it since beta
2.) WinMe behaved basically like Win98se
3.) dual-boot w. win2k to play certain games - yes
Basically Win2000 was the real game changer from the initial release (and even beta3 and some RCs) and Win2k continued to be the stable working horse for a long time on as it walked side-by-side with WinXP, because the WinXP initial release was really a piece of garbage - which really changed over time (SP2+).
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I ran Windows ME since it was in beta and never had any issues. It was basically Windows 98se with some minor changes. I don't think it was really any worse than Windows 98se. During this era I dual-booted with Windows 2000 as there were still apps and games that ran better on 9x. Was ME really "bad" compared to 98, or was it just that the NT-based operating systems that came afterward (XP, etc) were so much better?
Yeah, Windows ME was basically Windows 98 TE (third edition), or Windows 95 fourth edition. It is a good point that people look back on Windows ME with so much disgust because of the NT codebase variants that came out later (granted Windows 2000 did come out many months before ME).
But if memory serves, people really did think ME was a steaming pile of dog doo at the time, just comparing it to (most likely) Windows 98 SE. I think part of the problem is Microsoft actually charged people money for it. It
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I came across a Laptop with ME installed and hated it there and then, and this was after I had used Win98 for a couple of years. All I remember 18-19 years later is that it was amazingly unstable, but that I could not "downgrade" it for Win98 because the laptop needed some special drivers. My guess at the time was that everyone knew the Win95 - 98 - ME line was going to stop there and they were worried about being let go once ME was released, so the good programmers all themselves reallocated to the Win20
Two main things (Score:2)
1) I never installed it because heard it was full of cruft while doing little to fix 98's problems.
2) I marveled a little at how few people actually used it.
I don't think I ever came across a computer with it installed.
IIRC, If ME had improved upon 98 with better memory management, it would've been the go-to OS. Instead, we all eventually switched to the much more stable NT5.0 (Win XP).
One of the Windows systems I never used... (Score:2)
It was not as bad as Vista (Score:3)
Re:It was not as bad as Vista (Score:4, Insightful)
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The point was that vista and vista capable machines were actually just fine, what wasn't fine were the drivers from AMD/NVidia and many of the chipsets
No, Vista Capable machines were not "fine". They were seriously crippled machines that brought on a class action lawsuit. Those machines could barely run Vista--this was something that internal MS emails noted as MS executives were burned with "Vista Capable" machines
Mike Nash, vice president for Windows product management, was nailed by the Vista Capable change more than a year later when he bought a new laptop. "I know that I chose my laptop (a Sony TX770P) because it had the Vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run [Aero], but more important wouldn't run [Windows] Movie Maker," Nash said in an e-mail on Feb. 25, 2007. "Now I have a $2,100 e-mail machine."
"I know that I chose my laptop (a Sony TX770P) because it had the Vista logo and was pretty disappointed that it not only wouldn't run [Aero], but more important wouldn't run [Windows] Movie Maker," Nash said in an e-mail on Feb. 25, 2007. "Now
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They had more than a year to work on drivers, it was not some delayed release or big secret, the date was known nearly a year in advance.
The history of Windows Vista Development [wikipedia.org]. You do know that Vista development started in 2001, and all development on Project Longhorn was "reset' in 2004. If a developer was working on those builds, then all their work could have been thrown out. Vista was released in November 2006. Beta 1: July 2005. Beta 2: April 2006. RC1: August 2006. RC2: October 2006. By more than a year, you mean companies had less than 3 months with a RC version, then you would be correct.
Given the history of Vista with all their ch
Re:It was not as bad as Vista (Score:5, Interesting)
What made Vista look bad was hardware manufacturers were too slow in getting stable drivers out for the new architecture, especially the GPU makers.
This is oversimplification...
On the consumer front, GPU drivers weren't as much of an issue as the press says it was. Yeah, it didn't do the Aero effects, but Aero only lasted for Vista and 7; it was a lot of sizzle that made for lovely screenshots but wasn't a massive selling point.
No, the issues with Vista had to do with far greater amounts of growing pains.
The amount of disk I/O that Vista needed over XP was quite measurable. With 5400RPM drives still super common in consumer desktops at the time...and they were still being sold with 1GB of RAM or even 512MB to boot. OEMs were
Vista also forced everyone to fix the fact that everything ran as admin by default. This made a de facto requirement for software to run in a user context, but anyone installing their vintage-2005 software on Vista got UAC prompts for everything...meaning that UAC was its own worst enemy for years and commonly got disabled. Speaking of things that got disabled, driver signing started to become more commonplace after Vista, but in the XP era, companies as large as Creative Labs couldn't be bothered.
Vista was the 'sacrificial lamb'; Windows 7 was liked as much for its optimizations as for the changes that were made because of it. 2GB and 4GB of RAM became normalized, applications were not only revised to run in user mode, but began to get improvements for running multithreaded. Chrome and Firefox were drop-in replacements for IE9. DDR3 RAM, quad-core processors hitting the mainstream, and faster bus speeds complimented SSDs becoming affordable. More hardware started to become class compliant, and yes, Intel finally figured out how to make Aero compliant integrated graphics chipsets in their budget CPUs.
Vista was a line in the sand, and it was unliked because of it. Put Vista on a 1st-gen i5 with 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD and it was solid. Run it on a Celeron with 512MB of RAM and a 5400RPM hard drive half-filled with Sony shovelware and there's nothing likeable about that experience.
Uh, where's the service pack? (Score:2)
After years of cobbling together white boxes with their attendant compatibility issues (but they were cheap!) I went out and bought my wife a Compaq Deskpro with Windows ME. I figured that a professionally-built system *had* to be better, right? After all, Top Men were entrusted with the integration testing and everything...
Then the WinME bugs started to show. After about a year of fussing around with it and trying to work around the bugs I figured "There's so many bugs there must be a service pack, righ
not the last time MS would be winging it. (Score:2)
Do you ever get the impression that Microsoft doesn't really plan ahead for their operating systems, but just sort of slaps together something whenever they feel like they need a new one?
I mean, Windows 10 came out 6 years ago, but when they released Windows 11, it really wasn't that different and a large portion of the features they touted hadn't even been finished yet.
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Do you ever get the impression that Microsoft doesn't really plan ahead for their operating systems, but just sort of slaps together something whenever they feel like they need a new one?
I mean, Windows 10 came out 6 years ago, but when they released Windows 11, it really wasn't that different and a large portion of the features they touted hadn't even been finished yet.
That is the real mystery. Microsoft has lots of people and lots of money. This is not some tiny start-up working out of someone's garage. That is a company worth almost a Trillion Dollars, and yet they continue to turn out useless crap, with each new version of Windows being worse than the previous one.
MS CEMENT (Score:4, Informative)
Those days MS tried to solidify their market dominance, like: set it in stone. There was Windows CE, Windows ME and Windows NT. I actually bought a llicense for ME but never installed it, I was on the NT line since NT 3.51 and NT 4.0 was rock solid. There were no crashes, the ui was acceptable.
Those who changed from 95 to ME and on to w98 complained and complained but my boxen did fine.
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Nightmare to support (Score:2)
ME was a terrible experience for IT staff in SMBs who had yet to migrate away from Windows 9x to NT based systems. In fact ME led to us providing a lot of free support to clients to migrate them away from ME to XP as soon as we could. We handled upgrades for any client who purchased ME or a ME based system from us at no cost as long as they purchased the license. We didn’t do the same for those who wanted to go back to 98 or 95 as we were trying to get rid of those at the time.
So bad I gave up on Windows (Score:2)
Windows ME was so bad I gave up on Windows completely. Switched to Linux and MacOS... even ChromeOS. Never even considered going back.
I don't think Windows has gotten any better (just different problems... whack a mole) over the years.
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I don't think Windows has gotten any better (just different problems... whack a mole) over the years.
You could not possibly be more wrong. ME was simply the worst OS ever released by Microsoft, include Xenix.
Nearly all the complaints about Windows from the 95 era were totally gone by the time XP SP 2 came out, and Windows 7 was a superb OS.
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So I guess you don't upgrade your linux systems either.
You think those updates are all feature updates, right?
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I don't think Windows has gotten any better
You can't say that with a straight face. Seriously Windows ME is the only OS ever released which got worse when you rebooted.
I mostly skipped it (Score:2)
Since WinME basically felt like "Win98 /w extra bugs", and this was around the time that Win2k was coming out, I mostly managed to skip it. I basically went straight to Win2k, and never looked back. Of course I was also fortunate enough to be one of those people who actually chose what his computer ran, rather than being stuck with whatever some big box vendor chose to pre-install for me.
It was shelf filler. (Score:2)
It remained unopened for a few years until it was eventually thrown out.
Didn't Notice A Difference (Score:2)
When I started my job, I had the choice of which Windows I wanted to run. ME was the only version of Windows I hadn't tried yet, so I chose it. Frankly, I never had any more problems with it than I had with 3.1, 95, or 98. Not exactly high praise, since they all sucked pretty bad.
By far, though, the best part of ME was the pinball game that came with it.
Windows 2000 Home Edition that never was (Score:2)
I remember the W2K startup splash screen clearly said "Windows 2000 Professional - Built on NT Technology", the implication was that there was a Windows 2000 Home Edition.
That was until Microsoft and the PC industry decided that W2K was too beefy to run on most of the dreadful home PCs of the time. So the lighter Windows 98SE was slapped with a new coat of paint and the fancy features like System Restore were jammed onto it. What a mess it was. Blue screens after installation. Awful multitasking compared
Re: (Score:3)
Windows 98's system requirements are significantly lower than Windows 2000. A 486 is stretching it for Windows 98 just like a 386 was a stretch for Windows 95, but Windows 98 was generally pretty good with something like a Pentium MMX with 32 MB of ram. Windows 2000 really isn't very happy unless it's something like a Pentium II with 128MB. If you only have 32 or 64 MB of ram, Windows 2000 will still run but you would be much more happy with Windows 98.
The only case where I would say Windows 2000 is fast
Microsofts version of tick tock (Score:3)
Microsoft seems to have had their version of Intels tick tock model [wikipedia.org] for the consumer line of Windows OS:es. Memory tends to remember in weird ways but this is my recollection:
Windows 1 - ok, new for PC and an improvement to DOS only
Windows 2 - well, ok but meh
Windows 3 - less meh
Windows 3.11 - usable
Windows 95 - unstable until service pack 2 which more or less became '98
Windows 98 - usable
Windows ME - garbage
Winows XP - usable
Windows Vista - garbage
Windows 7- usable
Windows 8 - garbage UI
Windows 10 - pretty ok
Windows 11 - time will tell...
Luckily I spent many years working on Unix, Linux and Os X so I didn't suffer much by skipping every second version of Windows on my gaming computer.
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With every second version of Windows being garbage, my first thought when they went from Windows 8 to Windows 10 was that they were skipping the "good version" and going straight to the next "garbage".
It took a couple of months before I realised why they had skipped Windows 9: Microsoft had an "approved way" programmers could check which version of Windows their program was running under, but that "approved way" changed several times over the years. A fair number of programmers simply ignored them and chec
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I found Windows NT quite solid for its time. If I remember right, it was impossible to run DOS programs on it but at least what was supposed to work on it, actually did.
Vista was fine (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is, Vista actually enforced the Win32 spec that all the vendors, driver authors, and software authors had been completely ignoring for years.
Then you had AV products that randomly broke device driver installs.
I ran Vista just fine for several years on a new, but not extreme, spec PC that was about 6 months old when Vista was released.
Not the snappiest OS ever, but once I figured out my AV software was blocking two .dll's for my NVidia driver, I had no issues with the OS.
Never used it (Score:3)
I never used Windows ME, never even saw it. I used Windows 98 at the time when I wasn't using Linux and recommended it to non-technical users. Among other things, it had USB that worked. Some people claimed there was an implementation of USB on Windows 95 but after careful study I came to the conclusion that they were mistaken.
At work it was mainly Windows 2000. Then XP, Windows 7, now Windows 10 with Windows 11 breathing down our necks. In the meantime our server development has evolved from Solaris to Linux.
...laura
This was around the time I switched the Linux (Score:2)
I ran Win 2000 at this time, followed by XP. I kept XP until 7, and then ran 10. These were all dual boot with some version of Linux as the primary OS. I still have some needed programs that only run windows. I have no plans to use 11.
Re: (Score:2)
I had Win95 and Win98 at home - before moving to XP and following your progression.
At work it was Windows for Workgroups 3.11, Win98 (I think we skipped 95), NT4.x, Win2000 and finally Windows 7. At that point I pretty much stopped using Windows at work.
Everything! (Score:2)
I even remember Windows 1.03
Also at that time, DJs were called Wurlitzer.
That it would completely die from disk errors (Score:2)
Who? What? Where? When? (Score:3)
Never heard of it ... /s
Avoided it completely, as I'd switched to win2k long before it shat itself onto the world.
And, as everyone knows, win2k was the best version of windows microsoft ever released - XP and win7 were just iterations of it - and as we know, it was borne out of windows NT.
Nothing microsoft have released since, has surpassed just how damn good win2k was.
Re: (Score:2)
CHTST (Came here to say that)
Win2k was the first Windows OS that I found could stay up for an entire week without becoming unstable (as a desktop). After a week? YMMV. If used as a server, it could stay stable longer, depending on what it was running.
I got the firm to start doing a weekly bounce on the Win servers, and that decreased the number of "random" failures during the week (during a previous decade I used to have to do that to some of my Unix boxen, too--the ones operating as monolithic servers, but
Re: (Score:2)
Your existence is noted, grasshopper.
What Do You Remember About Windows ME? (Score:2)
What Do You Remember About Windows ME?
Blue, lots of Blue .... with white writing on it.
"The removal of real-mode DOS." (Score:2)
Simply wrong, Windows Me - was based off Windows 98 however with a bit more hiding accessability to the initial DOS-Boot.
https://www.computerworld.com/... [computerworld.com]
And btw. it wasn't that bad nor did it run worse than Win98.
I used it on this configuration
- Celeron333A
- 440BX
- AGP/Voodoo Banshee
- 128mbyte
- SB16
And it worked quite well.
But when I discovered the Beta3 of Win2k - WinME was forgotten.
What about Windows 2000? (Score:2)
No one cares about Windows ME (except to draw hate on it).
Windows 2000 came out the same year and still has some love.
What do you remember about Windows ME? (Score:2)
Absolutely nothing, since I switched from Windows 98SE to Mac OS X.
In fact, I've never used Windows ME in my life, not even for a second.
I manage a local Ma/Pa computer shop (Score:2)
That I knew a guy who led a charmed Life (Score:2)
Also and I can't prove this, but I'm fairly sure that Windows ME was only released because there are marketing department was worried people would get out of the habit of buying new Windows software every year. And that the product had been worked on and discarded as too unstable and too low quality to rele
Utter crap, de-installed it after 2 days (Score:2)
That was probably the point were I realized that Microsoft is just a bunch of 2nd rated amateurs when it comes to software and operating systems. Since then, I have seen nothing that would change my mind on that.
Windows ME? (Score:2)
It got me summoned to network security (Score:2)
Before 2013, most of our employees had desktop computers and each office had a sharable laptop. I as sent for training on a new CMS that was being developed and we had to bring a laptop. Ours were taken and there was a power differential between the admin staff and lawyers. I couldn't make even a polite request.
I brought my new computer from home and used it. After the training was over, I got a call from network security. When I got there, the officer showed me a list of login counts for the department.
It was suicidal (Score:2)
Windows ME would kill itself in three steps:
1) It took forever to shut down, so users would eventually force shutdown.
2) After a forced shutdown, it would run CHKDSK.
3) CHKDSK would eventually decide that the System32 directory was corrupt, and delete most or all of it.
It looked like they were going to use it a
Windows ME was among the releases I skipped (Score:2)
I've used most versions of Windows since 95, and the only ones I've skipped are Windows ME and the base Windows 8.
I went straight from 98 to 2000, which was a significant improvement.
I used ME once, on a secondhand machine I was repairing for a friend. Fixed it by digging out a copy of 98 (and later a lightweight Linux distro) for it. Both worked better than ME.
Constant Maintenance (Score:2)
All I remember is feeling sorry (Score:2)
For people not using NT. As far as Windows operating systems lucky enough to have gone from WFW to NT 3.5.1 never to look back. The whole 95/98/ME misadventure was not something I personally suffered thru.
Felt a lot better once XP became mainstream. Now I feel much worse since Windows has been weaponized against end users to treat them like shit and track/spy/stalk them.
There was a time where I looked forward to new shit even new Microsoft shit. Now I just want to throw up.
I don't (Score:2)
I was had been running Windows NT and Windows 98 at the time, and had no compelling reason to upgrade.
I did get sucked into both Vista and Windows 8 unfortunately. At least Microsoft admitted the mistake with 8 and gave you a free upgrade.
ME (Score:2)
I remember it was panned for no reasons as it wasn't more unstable than Windows 95, 98 and 98 SE before it. In fact it had features which allowed it to be more stable, e.g. it first introduced system restore.
Personally I liked it, though even more luckily Windows XP soon followed and ended the era of OS'es based on MS-DOS with no real memory protection and no real multitasking.
dvd playback on Windows 98se with Varo (Score:2)
It sucked (Score:2)
Don't forget the Secure Audio Path DRM stack... (Score:2)
One of the things Windows ME came with, which separated it from W98, was the Secure Audio Path DRM stack, where media can require that all hardware drivers be signed before it would be allowed to play. This was back in the days of a push for a SDMI standard (basically cross-platform DRM across everything that would disallow copying stuff from a device to a computer, max two devices, or three total a song could be copied to at a time, heavy watermarking, etc.). At this time, Apple wasn't even in the MP3 pl
my recollection (Score:2)
ME was the only OS from microsoft that lasted less than 2 days on my machine. it was that unstable. However, I loved the concept of system restore and the UI looked better than 98/2K.
i had a very old compaq laptop at the time that came with 95 i think. I kept getting tired of the bluescreens, so i eventually installed XP when it was released. However, XP didn't run well with 64 MB of ram even after manually disabling services. So i thought to install windows 2000 as it was supposedly very stable.
2000 driver
DOS (Score:3)
ME didn't actually remove DOS, it just made it much harder to access it. DOS was still there underneath the ui, and was used for the boot process. The old "exit to dos" option was gone.
ME? 98SE... (Score:3)
I just sat on Windows 98SE. It was a good, pretty much stable OS that most stuff in ME could be installed to (like the moviemaker) as well as a number of utilities from 2000. It served me well for at least 5 years in a couple of computers, until XP reached SP2 and was worth upgrading to. At the time, MS charged real money (about $100) to upgrade to a new OS version, so you really wanted to be sure it was going to provide some benefit before doing so. I still have 98SE, with all the patches and updates and a few that I didn't even know about at the time (there still a small enthusiast collection for it) running in VirtualBox, for a couple of games from back then. I also understand that there's a fork of DOSBOX that supports installation of all of the DOS-based versions of Windows including 98 and, with some caveats, ME, which I have to investigate and which might make the VirtualBox hack unnecessary. And it's funny, the first laptop I got assigned to me at work was a heavy, gray beast with a 486 running Windows 98SE - it ran Word etc. - what passed for Office at the time - and ran for about 4 hours on a battery charge.