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The underapreciated Windows ME

I'm sad that I never got the chance to try out ME, in fact I've never even seen it running on a real computer. It did have a horrible reputation though, it was "a bug masquerading as an OS".

I've heard that it looks lot like Windows 2000, which is not a bad thing. Windows 2000 was (and still is) an excellent and incredibly stable OS.
 
The only thing I ever liked about WinME was the system tools were so much better than 98SE. I used to keep a CD of disk defragmenter and a few other programs to backport to 98SE.

Disk Defragmenter in Windows 98 was atrocious. It'd restart every time it detected some change on the disk, which was basically constant, even when you killed everything possible. On heavily fragmented drives, the first 10% always took hours, after which it usually sped up, but was still painful.

The Disk Defragmenter in ME more or less fixed all of the annoying problems the Windows 98 version had and was so much faster. It was annoying that Microsoft didn't release an update for Windows 98 to replace Disk Defragmenter with the newer version.
 
Robbbert said:
I'm sad that I never got the chance to try out ME, in fact I've never even seen it running on a real computer. It did have a horrible reputation though, it was "a bug masquerading as an OS".

I've heard that it looks lot like Windows 2000, which is not a bad thing. Windows 2000 was (and still is) an excellent and incredibly stable OS.
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If you want Windows 98SE to have some of the features (and the 2000 look) you can install the unofficial service pack 2.1 for Windows 98. In fact, when right clicking on My Computer and bringing up properties Windows will report itself as Me, which is confusing, as it's still 98SE.
 
Robbbert said:
I'm sad that I never got the chance to try out ME, in fact I've never even seen it running on a real computer. It did have a horrible reputation though, it was "a bug masquerading as an OS".

I've heard that it looks lot like Windows 2000, which is not a bad thing. Windows 2000 was (and still is) an excellent and incredibly stable OS.
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Windows ME is basically Windows 98SE with bugfixes and tools that later appeared in Windows XP and running the Windows 2000 look. Like I've said previously here. I love ME. It's like 98SE with less hastle to set it up.
 
Alabamarebel1861 said:
Its not that I have fond memories of anything. It's that I still currently use these old OSes everyday. Hell right now my current client is a Windows 2000 system. I'm not looking through some rose tinted lenses or something. I'm using these OSes in a real work environment literally everyday.
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Whats wrong with rose tinted glasses? I love wearing sepia tinted UV protection goggles "everyday is SOOO nice!"..... Windows 2000 is beast and a workhorse.. Good for you.... And got it.. Everyday....

And gonna dissagree hard again on you. You must have compatibility issues with something your running 98 on. ME DOES NOT out perform 98... Not ever. I mean its ok you like it. You can be its biggest fan and its ok. I mean hell, for some reason people like Birch beer, even though to me it tastes like Pepto Bismol. You can like something... But you cant put it on a pedestal when it doesn't deserve to be there.
 
Also, you kind of are viewing things through rose-tinted lenses, if you're using Me after the fact, as they left it, with fixes in place and things basically functional. Because that was not the context of pretty much anyone else's experiences with it. The reason it got the reputation it did was because, at the time, that reputation was richly deserved. The fact that they eventually patched it into being what it should've been in the first place does nothing to change that.
 
That was going to be my first question of the OP: "Exactly when did you start using Windows ME?" Because if it was in 2000, I'm pretty sure your opinion would be vastly different.

But then, the same could be said of Windows Vista or Windows 8. Terrible, if you used them at the time of introduction; better, if you started using them after all the patches came out.
 
kc8eyt said:
If you want Windows 98SE to have some of the features (and the 2000 look) you can install the unofficial service pack 2.1 for Windows 98. In fact, when right clicking on My Computer and bringing up properties Windows will report itself as Me, which is confusing, as it's still 98SE.
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Er... I'd say that's actually WinMe. You can strip down WinMe to be like Win98 (basically turn off system restore and add back in bootable DOS -- the two biggest complaints), or you can go the other way and bring up Win98 to be on the level of WinMe.

WinMe was such a minor footnote that it should have been called Win98 Third Edition. And no Win9x releases were perfect in the realm of stability. Yes WinMe was a market failure, but that's about it. It's about as good or bad as the rest of that series. Maybe MS intended to end it that way to get the hold outs off of 9x onto NT
 
VERAULT said:
Whats wrong with rose tinted glasses? I love wearing sepia tinted UV protection goggles "everyday is SOOO nice!"..... Windows 2000 is beast and a workhorse.. Good for you.... And got it.. Everyday....

And gonna dissagree hard again on you. You must have compatibility issues with something your running 98 on. ME DOES NOT out perform 98... Not ever. I mean its ok you like it. You can be its biggest fan and its ok. I mean hell, for some reason people like Birch beer, even though to me it tastes like Pepto Bismol. You can like something... But you cant put it on a pedestal when it doesn't deserve to be there.
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I'll put whichever OS pleases me the most on a pedestal and that just happens to be 2K and ME. 98 Doesn't have nearly the built-in driver database ME does which makes a big difference when your trying to get a machine up in a reasonable amount of time. I'm sorry but at least to me the only things that 98 can hold over me is better DOS support and being less recourse intensive. Other than that I've had far better stability with ME and most of my machines are fast enough to run it so it runs smooth as butter. I'm not calling 98SE bad dude I'm just saying ME was a step up.
 
commodorejohn said:
Also, you kind of are viewing things through rose-tinted lenses, if you're using Me after the fact, as they left it, with fixes in place and things basically functional. Because that was not the context of pretty much anyone else's experiences with it. The reason it got the reputation it did was because, at the time, that reputation was richly deserved. The fact that they eventually patched it into being what it should've been in the first place does nothing to change that.
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Even the friends I have who did use it at the time weren't that let down. The only complaint most of them had was that it was recourse heavy which it is. Other than that I really doubt it was ever that bad.
 
That might be true, but how many WinMe users did you know in 2000?

That certainly wasn't the opinion in 2006

This might be the worst version of Windows ever released--or, at least, since the dark days of Windows 2.0. Windows Millennium Edition (aka Me, or the Mistake Edition) was Microsoft's follow-up to Windows 98 SE for home users. Shortly after Me appeared in late 2000, users reported problems installing it, getting it to run, getting it to work with other hardware or software, and getting it to stop running. Aside from that, Me worked great.
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If a handful of people you know had good luck with it, well, I'm happy for them. But that doesn't change anything about what pretty much the entire rest of the world had to deal with at the time.
 
Alabamarebel1861 said:
I'll put whichever OS pleases me the most on a pedestal and that just happens to be 2K and ME. .
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Do you understand windows 2000 (not 2k, give it the respect it deserves) IS really NT 5.0? I remember running it from MSDN cd's in the late 1990s when it was still called NT 5.0. HAS NOTHING AT ALL TO DO WITH MILLENNIUM! It was the next incarnation of Windows NT and it was beautiful. Windows ME was a bastardized bloated and overpatched carcass of what used to be windows 95.

commodorejohn said:
If a handful of people you know had good luck with it, well, I'm happy for them. But that doesn't change anything about what pretty much the entire rest of the world had to deal with at the time.
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Case and point. I remember being at a LAN party in 2000 and one of our buddies brought in his machine with ME. We were all like "what are you doing?!" He spent most of the night formatting and reloading his box... Never got to use it from what I remember. That pretty much summed up pretty much every interaction with it I remember seeing. Again, Never saw it used in a corporate environment (other than the one offs that always pop up).. That tells you the sum of it.
 
I was doing small business network support at the time. Literally no one used ME. Unsupported hardware guys and gamers stuck to 98SE and everyone else went to win2k immediately
 
IIRC a lot of W98ME was OEM. It was a great selling point for them but then W2K bursted on the scene about the same time. I missed both, W98ME & W2K, but leaped right into XP a short while later. I was using NT4 and OS/2 at home and work. There was a lot of Microsoft activity around and just after the year 2000. I do have W2K on an ancient laptop and have a stand alone copy of W2K looking for home in a mini-tower, but no W98ME.
 
Part of Windows ME's reputation is probably due to it's short lifecycle. It ended before many of the bugs were fixed, unlike Microsoft's other offerings, where most of the bugs are fixed at EOL. I don't remember it being better or worse for average users.

I've been recently using Windows XP and 7 to run old, but very useful software offline, and I forgot just how darned good the old UI was. Windows 7 on a fast graphics equipped machine was the pinnacle.

Yes, I'm using Windows 10 at present when I have to.
 
I think MS put Win ME out there just so the initial release of XP wouldn't look so bad ;-)
 
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