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Windows Me: The WORST Version of Windows
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- Опубліковано 3 лис 2022
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Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me, was widely panned for being an unstable, buggy mess. Why was it so bad?
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You know an operating system is terrible when you can memorize the entire 25-character license key from installing it so many times.
Lmao
My OSes were: XP, 7, 8.1 and now 10
@@mica7191 Mine were MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 10, and 11. For some reason, by hard drive didn't like 8, so I skipped that one.
@@BrentJohn hum... I might consider 11 as well... with registry edits... got an i5-4460
@@BrentJohn DOS 6.22? I also tried OS2 for a week.
ME did stink on ice. XP was great because it was bug fixed very fast and Microsoft actually paid the beta testers they used rather than use customers as beta testers.
And now people adopting W11 are the unpaid beta testers
History repeats itself or something along those lines
Agreed. ME is so terrible.. My favs are XP, 7, 10
XP was only great compared to ME. In hindsight it was pretty bad too until SP2.
Yet they have got rid of all the testers for windows 10 and 11
Windows Me was a startling success compared to Windows 3.x. It would run out of x86 segmented 16bit DOS memory because it was x86 segmented 16bit DOS memory. Any application that used a lot of memory made it so that you needed to reboot more often. Heavy tasks like development, database management, complicated office documents, etc etc... It's why I used the DOS AOL client as a kid. Few people knew about the DOS AOL client and even fewer still actually used it, but since it was based on the little known GEOS desktop environment libraries it ran silky smooth and stable. Literally the only reason Windows 3.x became popular is because Microsoft had a great marketing and licensing program to get it to ship with OEM PCs.
I used to have the paranoid fantasy that there were two development teams, which alternated producing the releases. One team made good ones and the other team spit out lemons.
So team one made 98, Xp, 7, and 10, and team 2 made ME, vista, 8, and 11.
@@pengil3 No, actually, I was thinking of earlier releases, ending at Vista.
I always thought it was that the lemon team came up with the ideas for the OS but had no technical knowledge to make it workable (ME, Vista, 8), whereas the good team took the ideas from the lemon team and actually made it usable (XP, 7, 10). Now it's come to Windows 11 both teams seem to have merged as it's an OS that has both good ideas and is useable. A miracle!
@@andrewwebb3431 That makes more sense than my speculation.
I used to say back around 2005 that Microsoft's Windows release cycle was good, bad, good, bad (specifically referring to 9x). That works with the idea of two different teams working on alternate releases. 😂
Windows ME was the bain of my existence as a 13 year old. Dealing with ME and its mountain of issues taught me a great deal of IT skills I'd never needed with 98SE, lmao.
Same, it's just that I'm most probably a bit younger than you xD
same
Lmao same story as many Linux users, different conclusion x)
I have had a similar situation but with hardware instead of software, I used to have this old PC from 2007 that was absolute garbage, the computer was litteraly almost the same age as me since I was born in 2006. Dealing with that computer taught me a lot about hardware and sometimes I kinda miss it haha. It made me love working with computer hardware and now I plan on going to college and do some Computer Hardware Engineering
I had ME as a teenager - on a Pentium 60 with a VESA card and a Maxtor hard disk. 12 Mb RAM too.
That was sooooooooooooooooooo much fun!!!
I had Windows ME as a child, I had fun clicking around and playing with some pre installed games, screensavers, themes etc. My first real games were Project IGI, Max Payne and The Sims.. I have good memories even though Max Payne gave me nightmares haha. But I'm sure the IT savy people of then disliked Windows Me.
Omg! Project IGI? I remember that game!
Good times!
My family's first computer was a Gateway running ME when I was a kid. Even though we knew pretty much nothing about computers when we bought it, we all learned really quick how to boot into safe mode and do system restores, because the OS would fail catastrophically about once or twice a month and that was the only way to fix it haha. My dad has always been super cheap, but he gladly bought a whole new machine with XP on it just a year or two later and we put that Gateway on the curb with no regrets. In retrospect we probably would have been fine just downgrading it to Win98, but none of us knew how to do that at the time
@@shoego they are coming back with new igi game titled origins after 20 years
Some of the computers in my school ran Windows ME, and students logged onto their user accounts from a domain. They were slow because the laptops were sluggish, but the operating system did the job. There was no issues with Windows ME in a corporate environment other than it not being on the NT kernel. I also have a Dell Dimension 8100 which runs Windows ME pretty well. The moment we upgraded to Windows XP Home Edition, the computer started crashing and none of the DOS applications functioned. Oh, and the Home doesn't have the ability to log into a domain which is absolutely unacceptable.
I worked in Tech Support during the ME days. We had an entire floor of software folks working on solutions to keep the thing stable enough for people to use it. I ran it with few issues, but I did breathe a BIG sigh of relief when XP launched. I actually beta-tested XP and liked it so much, even in beta, that I ditched ME.
Good to know. Yes, XP was fanTASTIC!
How were the unleaked Whistler builds like?
@@jhj681 the commenter literally said that he was Beta-Testing XP. Wdym?
Did that exact thing with Vista. Ran the 7 beta starting in early 2009 because it ran so much better than Vista on the same hardware. Prior to that, I had given Vista every shot I could before finally reverting to XP.
I'm one of those who have fond memories of Windows ME. Maybe i was one of the lucky ones, but I never considered it to be more buggy than other versions of the Windows that time. So I never regretted to pirating it.
I had a pretty rough experience compared to 95 at the time but It's actually ridiculously solid on more modern hardware, I've got a circa 2004 pentium 4 3.0ghz HT that still runs ME flawlessly, it's the oldest shit I got that still supported ME out of the box. Awesome for 16 bit games
ME worked great for me as well. It's the only version I ever purchased. At least it until the days of cheap gray market OEM licenses.
I liked ME too. I had a pentium 3 laptop that ran it pretty well.
I liked ME too. Never had a problem with it.
#MEtoo
Fun fact a lot of blue screens came because developers had to manually clear old data from the ram if they didn't do this the pc would simply run out of resources and crash. Bluescreens were partly Microsoft fault but could also be due to bad software design from third-party apps you were using
this is way above "home users" understanding like IE5 from '99 allowing all that HTML5 can now do like text shadows and image mirror that W3C allowing netscape(lol), chrome, and opera in window7 to finally do what windows 98 could do... IE5 and free geocities websites allowed things people are just now getting back into with web design today... ActiveX filesystem access, DirectX css filters, css expressions, java applets, etc allowed way more in a browser than we can do now...
Windows ME and trying to play aoe2 on the MSN gaming zone in grade school is why I learned how computers work. I probably wouldn’t have the career I have today if it worked without issues. Thanks Billy!!!
Billy Coore from The Nostalgia Mall?
Been wondering how would it be if I paired my Celeron E3400 with a lower end GPU... instead of a GMA X4500 onboard granny
@@myk1_sp No, the Billy who got pied.
Windows 98 will forever be jank but will ALWAYS have a place in my heart as the first OS I used and the start of my interest in computers!
Use 98SE people.
@@carltonleboss thanks. I'll keep that in mind if i ever wake up in 1999
98SE had the flash drive support that ME's being credited for, so it wasn't *that* bad
@@carltonleboss Lmao I also remember 98SE having a much better reputation, to the point where people would compare it to windows XP (they were wrong).
Windows 98 SE was very decent for its time. People like to repeat what they hear on youtube, especially younger ones who didn't even use it when it was around.
I have used every OS that Windows "shipped", basically upgrading as soon as they were launched. I have now a high-stress tolerance. 😄
I remember ME and I loved it. Never had issues with this version of windows. But really loved the NT platform and with it was move available sooner than it was for personal market.
same, I
used to watch the whole video when installing it ... still have the audio clip from there on my phone as an alarm
Did you upgrade to ME from a previous version of Windows or just install it fresh? Seemingly more people have issues because they "upgrade" to OSes that weren't supposed to be on their hardware. It's unfortunately an issue that persists to this day.
I also adored the NT platform, IF YOU CAN AVOID DOS PROGRAMS!
WIndows ME was the main reason I forced myself to understand at least the hardware aspect of a PC. Glad to figure out more RAM helped.
I had a good time with ME. Having lived through all the versions, the worst was actually 95. It wasn't uncommon to have to reinstall windows each month because of how messed up it would get.
I wonder why Windows 2000 gets swept under the rug so often, it came out in February of 2000 and was actually pretty good. Also already used NT 5.0 according to Wikipedia.
I would assume it’s due to Windows 2000 being intended to be used in a business environment rather than for home use. (Since Microsoft knew that making their business customers run the DOS-based 9x systems would be a huge liability)
From what I’ve read there were people who moved to 2000 out of frustration with ME. But yeah thankfully XP finally put the DOS-based windows systems out of its misery.
I had the same thought why Win2k so often gets missed. It ran most games just fine and was plenty stable.
@@TheMrDeeJay I did drop ME for 2000 on a laptop and never looked back. It was rock stable, but it gave a performance hit in games if they did run. Also, it had complete usermanagement, which was something you had to learn to deal with. AND not every piece of hardware came with NT/W2000-drivers, so it wasn't always possible.
In XP almost all those headache where gone, and it was better usable for non-tech savvies..
I guess because you needed about 64MB RAM to run it, which was quite a lot at the time. I ran it, and it was a massive improvement over 98.
Windows 2000 was one of my favourite Windows versions, massively underrated. I never even loaded ME and went straight to 2000. Never liked the 9x series much it was a poor design technically
Windows ME also had a bug that it wouldn't actually delete certain temporary files but would say they did. So at some point your hard drive would get full and cause there system to become unstable.
I had to reformat yearly because of it.
I have that same issue in Windows 10. Have to manually delete everything in the temp folder to improve log-in\loading times.
I distinctly remember trying to run windows me on my own PC back then, and seeing the cursor hop across the monitor like it was a slideshow, that was enough for me to never try it again >
It didn't differ from 95 and 98 that much, did it?
@@carltonleboss hardware/software constant failures, and not recognizing simple things was horrendous+alot of people had lots of mouse stutter. Reinstalling it multiple times actually fixed some driver issues for some people I knew at the time, and if they needed help we would do a backup and full reinstall till some drivers would just start working, lol. Sometimes there was no way around it.
@@carltonleboss It had 'system restore' which previous windows did not have. I found that was the cause of nearly 100% of any issues I had. Disable system restore and any performance issues and errors disappeared.
Wish I had an old PC and ME so I could make a video on this. Because I've not seen a single "ME BAD" videos by 'tech experts' ever cover this. Probably because many of them these days don't look old enough to have ever actually used it themselves lol.
I knew an engineer that still uses Windows 95 BETA (!) on an vintage PC. This goes hand in hand with many engineer's websites which look uber 1990's.
Who else remembers NewShell for Windows 3.1 that made 3.1 feel like 95?
I loved ME, was rock solid and quick AF. Never had any stability problems, seems I was in the minority though.
I was a preteen when it came out, but I remember system restore was an absolute gamechanger with Windows in that era.
This video brought ME some awful nostalgia, it even teared my eyes bringing back the memories of how I had to summon task manager as soon as the OS loaded, in order to close programs and rubbish that started for no reason at boot, XP was like a bucket of ice in the middle of the Sahara, and I kept it for so long that when I finally stopped using it, I moved to 7
You're forgetting the fun one did you ever wonder why Windows me got the nickname windows many errors as a joke it's because several problems were occurring one being that if you turned on any smart Drive features in Windows me that it would corrupt the hard drive and crashed the NTFS partition
I used Me a lot, upgrading from 95 & 98. Never faced issues more than previous versions and actually really enjoyed using it. Never understood why it got so much hate.
People have hardware which wasn't compatible with Windows ME. Also booting into DOS was removed. My Dell 8100 worked fine with Windows ME. It started becoming terribly unstable when we upgraded to XP Home.
In my eyes, Windows me wasn't that bad. I was already on my ongoing Linux journey, but Windows me was my gaming base. The try to hide DOS was silly (it was still "under the hood"), but in my memory the bluescreens wheren't worse than Windows 9x.
Just wait until people remember that windows 1.0 didn't even have moveable windows
I had a rock-solid Windows ME slot A system - still one of the best systems I ever built, only got replaced for Half Life 2. A lot of people just sucked at building boxes back then. How could I tell? Softmodems everywhere.
Same problem today. 98% of people using PC's have no idea what they're doing. You could apply that to almost all tech. Even the 'pro-gamers'. Anyone can build a new pc now, but still very few go beyond the basics. Back then shit wasn't so plug n play.
The trick to Windows Millenium was to disable system restore.
Had a Pentium 133 16mb ram and 2 Voodoo 2's in SLi and it benchmarked better with WIndows ME than it did with 98 after I turned off system restore which really seemed to slow the system down.
@@TheCunningStunt That's good information to know, thank you for mentioning this!
I remember switching from older ones to XP quite a difference, I remember adding extra RAM improved OS alot.
My first version of windows was ME, and I literally never had any issues. I don’t know what everyone is going on about.
In hindsight, it was a bit of a bloated mess, but it didn’t ever just fail to work properly for me.
My first pc I bought from a guy who worked at a bank and he salvaged the parts from that bank of systems that didn't meet the requirement to be auctioned off i.e they were bricks. The bank used it for like 7 years. I bought it for 5 dollars. Had 256 MB SD ram (two 128 mb sticks), Pentium 4 (single core), 20 gb hdd, 16 inch CRT.with internal modem and video card. This was in 2008 😂
I used ME when I was young. It was my second OS after 98. It was perfectly fine. I rarely ever got a BSOD, and never had any driver issues.
They used to say that the "95" in "Windows 95" stood for the amount of the code that was complete when they shipped it.
Windows ME would just lock up randomly for me all the time. I had anywhere between an hour to 5 minutes to do whatever I wanted to do before it would freeze. Going from ME to XP was the best day of my young life.
I was one of the lucky ones who had no problems with Windows Me.
Back then some games would work only on windows me or older and not on XP.
My first StarCraft copy worked exclusively on Windows Me for some reason
Idk, I've went through all those and Windows 11 is currently winning for me now as the worst Windows ever...
ME is still worse, but 11 have many "features" that you would only find in machines infected with malware back then.
Windows 11 is Just as a good as Windows 10 even better in some aspects
Ah yes, Jackery. That room that rich people have in their houses dedicated to a specific activity.
"If anyone needs me, I'll be adjourning to the Jackery for the next 20 minutes"
I was one of those who downloaded test versions of Windows 95. It was amazing, especially when paired with Netscape Navigator, the hot new version of Mosaic and a 57.6k modem.
Four years later, it was time to go to Windows 2000.
you mean.....56.6K?
One funny thing is, last I looked, the few people still trying to run Windows 98 will sometimes replace DLLs with ones from ME because the ME ones are supposed to be more compatible or have bug fixes.
I'll say it as many times as I can. Windows Millenium was waaaaay better than 98 and previous Windows. Once you disabled the new at the time system restore.
See it still today, every time a new Windows come out the peasants who don't know what they're doing instantly hate on it because 'reasons'.
Reasons being new things are scary and people don't bother to read manuals and learn how to use the tech they use.
Look for the Maximus Decim USB drivers. He took the WinMe USB drivers, put them in an installer for Win98SE. With that installed, any USB device that just works in WinMe will do the same in 98SE. Someone else did the same to make the WinMe USB drivers work in Win98 original, but who wants to run that garbage? 98SE was far better.
@@greggv8 I've used those. Extremely useful. Flash drives when they first came out were rather a pain to use on Win98 since you couldn't use the flash drive to transfer the driver (for that specific flash drive, no less) to the machine and Win98 didn't have built in drivers (probably predates the device class spec). So, you needed some other way to get the driver on the machine so you could use a flash drive.
In particular though, I was referring to MDGx's "KILLER REPLACEMENTS: ME → 98 SE". It appears Windows ME had lots of components that got bug fixes and improvements. And those can be grafted onto Win98se.
@@ccoder4953 I'd like to find old software called 3D FAX. It could encode any file to a series of 2D "barcode" TIFF images then FAX them. The recipient could get them with a modem and 3D FAX could decode direct from the images or if the recipient had a FAX machine the printouts could be scanned.
Computer files could be stored on paper in a file cabinet.
@@greggv8 I'm sure you could find that on some abandonware site, but, honestly, why would you want to? The data density of something like that is going to be absolutely awful. We're talking filing cabinet to store a CD type stuff.
I get you might want some sort of long term archive. But, if it's text, just print out the plaintext. That should be readable as long as the paper and ink doesn't degrade. If it's data, properly stored tapes can have quite good lifetimes. There's also this thing called Millenniata or M-disk. If you believe their accelerated life testing, they are supposed to have very long lifetimes (hundreds of years). They need a special writer, but can be read in any normal drive.
I knew immediately this would be about Windows ME. I never tried it, but I will always remember it for all of the games and software that specifically did not support ME. And how fast it was swept under the rug in favor of XP.
Windows XP Pro 64 bit was the all around best OS, IMO.
Unfortunately hardware and software companies quit supporting it when the next version of windows was released.
I ran XP for close to 15 years before I had to abandon it for lack of support, not only from MS, but everybody else.
The nVidia GeForce GTX 950 was the last video card to support XP. It's still in may backup computer, but now running Windows 10.
Windows ME stood for "Might Explode" at any moment. Using it - BSOD. Looking at it - BSOD. Wind blowing in the wrong direction - BSOD.
I can definitely support this judgment. I friend of mine had a PC with Windows ME and I had a lot of "fun" making it run again and again. On my own PC, I switched from Win 98 to Win 2000 instead.
You have to consider back then if you had a computer in your home, programs bugging out or crashing were a fact of life. You learned to work around what made your PC crash and you knew technology wasn't perfect but you where lucky to be in the cutting edge. Besides if you had a pc and wanted a GUI you had no choice, it was either Win9x, rolling back to 3.1
you could buy win2k - worked really well. less game support though most worked fine, and for those that still needed dos, could dual boot with a small Win9x partition. Win2k was a great os :)
I ran Rad Hat Linux 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2 back then. Want a GUI? I was able to get XFree86 working(X Windows), but I don't think I got it working until about a year after I started using Linux. So, 1998. Back then not too many had X Windows up and working, but it was certainly possible!
I had this bizzare unicorn of a PC that was not only a Gateway, but a Gateway running Windows Me that got me though college running Adobe, Ms Office, and Warcraft 3 without a problem. I eventually got around to installing XP, but it was mostly out of curiosity than necessity.
The one thing I remember from when I had a Windows ME system as a kid was how often the thing hung on startup. Lord knows if it was the OS or something else.
It was probably something else. If you installed MS Windows, AND NOTHING ELSE, there wasalmost always no problems. But usually the reason you install Windows is because of some other software that you want to install and run. After installing some other programs back then, I could boot up Windows 95 and sit there and watch it for two minutes, and it would just crash... all on it's own. Then again, it wasn't exacly all on it's own, it was because of another program that was running in the background. But this program was supposed to have been made for Windows 95! It was enough to make me pull my hair out.
I moved over. I moved over to Red Hat 5.0, 5.1, and then 5.2. After that I was a Debian Stable guy for many years. Now I run Garuda Linux and Debian Siduction.
Win 8 is my most hated version.
mine too, and I still have to use it because some systems at my workplace run it...
ME for sure. The best thing you can hope for is for no BSODs and a stablish system. Second place is Windows 11 and its Spyware and locked down specs, unless you want to risk losing updates.
me could agree but 11 is not 2nd worst - you probably havent used 98 and Plung and Pray when bluscreens where normal everyday activity
the specs are probably to stop people running Windows 11 on their core 2 duo laptop from 2007 and complaining about how slow it is
who cares about the worst, all of them are worse than the windows 7, the best windows of them all yet, but vista is considered the worst for me personally because the specs jump from the prev version is the most notable one, and it changes my favorite pipes screensaver to a bunch of drunk person riding tron bikes that lags my pc, and a lot of crashes on my system
@@mukyumukyun windows 7 is amazing, although I would say 10 is the best when it comes to UI/UX or customer experience.
I'd agree more if you said windows 10, compared to 8.1 the then new start menu was awful (looks wise and somewhat usability wise) in comparison to the start screen and live tiles really only shined on Windows 8.1, on Windows 10 they were just blobs of whatever theme color you chose
If I remember correctly, there were two things that I could remember about it, it dropping support for dos-based games and that one windows media player skin you see a lot in the marketing, the one with the head. Had a love/hate relationship with it.
I was at Microsoft the day they released “me”. During a break, they had a room with name brand vendors like HP displaying their computers running it. I was able to crash two of them in under 5 minutes. We all knew it was a disaster waiting to happen.
The only 2 versions of Windows that I have used that I actually like are 8 and 11. 8 because it looked better to me and 11 because it looks the most UNIX like but it runs the programs that I use. Overall Mint I my favorite OS.
When I was a kid my dad had setup our computers to dual boot ME and 2000. You know, 2000 was much more stable and stuff, but it also lacked the compatibility to play a lot of the games I wanted to. XP mixing the compatibility and stability was great and it's a shame that Microsoft's failed to deliver such an immense improvement in a new OS since.
I just went back to 98SE. After that I used Win2000 SP4 for gaming until WinXP SP1. SP4 allowed DirectX installation.
I guess you had cracked windows 2000 since it wasn't for home users
@@namesurname4666 would simply be impossible to use a professional OS at home
Yes 95 was light years ahead of 3.1 (98 was a small upgrade), XP was light years ahead of ME and 95/98 Windows 7 was light years ahead of XP, Vista and 8 forget about it lol. Windows 10/11 is good but not as revolutionary as Windows 7 was and I still miss AERO.
Windows 8 was truly skippable... a textbook case of vendor ego and selfishness
Our family computer growing up had ME and honestly I didn't think it was that bad. Ignoring the fact that my cd writer would cause random BSOD's due to driver conflicts lol ah memories.
I actually don't remember a time that i had blue screen or something similar with Windows Me. Probably the exception but still...
Pretty much the same on my Siemens Nixdorf Laptop with ME (except if I did something stupid ofc)
Windows ME... zero question. They didn't even try to fix that pile of crap. They just killed it off and pretended it never happened. I ended up using Windows 2000 after 98SE, but I didn't have an option since I was running a dual CPU setup at the time.
2000 was great.
Neptune! I got the build floating around a few years later and I tried it on real hardware. It was AMAZING. There were no drivers for it - and I didn't tinker that much with it, but it was a huge step forward and you could tell.
Used ME all through high school. The startup process for my laptop was mostly going ctrl-alt-delete as soon as the desktop show and closing a bunch of specific programs so that it wouldn't crash
In fact I have quite fond memories of ME and Vista 😁
I remember Win2K used to say "built on windows NT Technology", which always made me smile, as NT was "New Technology". Nothing like New Technology Technology...
Talking about ME keeps ending up sounding like someone insulting themselves with bad grammar.
Windows ME was my first OS. From 2006 to 2009, so I always had my Mum's XP laptop to show me how bad my OS actually was. Probably the reason I learned so much about tinkering with every possible setting, commandline and Registry editor. At some Point my Pre-Installed MS-Paint turned itself into a DOS program, stopped working and never worked again, not even after doing one of those fancy Restores.
ME was also the reason I got into Linux very early, asking my dad to get me something that was more reliable when using Word, he installed Edubuntu with Openoffice for me.
This was posted 16 seconds ago. Obviously I haven’t watched the whole video yet. :(
Same
Don't agree. Windows Vista was the worst one. Used it only for an hour perhaps. But used win me for years.
This whole script has language that makes old nerds have huge nostalgia vibes.
I was a Dell technician during the era where Windows ME was still relevant and XP was starting to take over. Any Windows ME call was guaranteed to last 1 hour +. Never failed.
My worst windows experience is Windows Vista, didn't had much trouble with Windows ME at all.
It's been a few years and even back then the explanation may not have been 100% accurate? But... The scoop was that besides all of that (which is bad enough) MS was trying desperately to get rid of 16-bit code. ME fell into a weird experimental midpoint in that process where MS tried to implement workarounds to support 16-bit drivers and code with a purely 32-bit kernel but without sandboxing, like was done in the NT kernel. As a result, the more 16-bit drivers you had on ME, the more likely you'd encounter a bug in this hastily conceived attempt by MS to purge all things 16-bit from the kernel without actually dropping 16-bit support. (Which was why ME didn't just use real mode DOS like 9x.)
I don’t remember ever having a bad experience with ME.
I remember doing a fresh install of ME for my cousin since he had a fresh copy. As soon as it attempted to boot for the first time, it crashed. We never got it to boot.
I thought we were talking about 11...
Bro 💀
First reply
I hate 11. Damn it's updates, and it's constant changing of privacy setting. I want 10 back.
@@jakesully2868 windows 11 keys work on windows 10
Riley: Windows ME Is The Worst Version Of Windows!
Everyone: So You Would Hate Yourself If You Were A Windows Version.
I never saw any commercials for the OS and live in a non-English speaking country so I had absolutely no idea it was supposed to be pronounced "me" instead of "M.E." until today.
We didn't have any trouble with windows Me, but it was absolutely slammed at the time. Maybe it was fine for us because we only ran it on one new machine and made few demands of it. I did a double-take on the win 98 se system requirements mentioned in this video though - by the time it came out a 486 DX2 would have felt ancient. I wonder if anyone ran it successfully on such hardware.
They were still making cheap laptops with 486 processors until 1998 or 1999. The 486 lasted alot longer than many people think, maybe in part because uptake was slow when it first arrived in 89 and then even though the Pentium came around in 1993, many people found 486 systems a cheap upgrade from their 286 and 386's , whereas the Pentiums were initially expensive and also buggy. Also the internet in the 1990's was slow, mostly static pictures and didn't push anyone's PC unlike the modern web.
Once I remove my nostalgia filter, I start to remember having to Frankenstein in certain version numbers of .dll files to make things work....
ME was awful, slow, and everything broke or stopped working when me and my friends upgraded. What a nightmare that OS was. I was 23 in the retail tech sector then; working at a custom computer store. I built my first computer in my mid teens in the mid 90’s and I used to say “Man, if i can’t figure this out, what’s happening to regular consumers?” 😅
I have never heard anyone call it 'Windows me' before, it has always been 'M.E.' What crazy universe have I fallen into?
I thought this was going to be a bash on Win11 and I was already thinking, "No way worse than ME, that crashed all the time"
I remember when a friend of mine built a new PC and was all smug about it. He installed Windows Me on it and it blue screened soon after he started installing the drivers. I really enjoyed seeing his, “I’m better then you!”, computer crash and burn!
I'm amazed they actually made NT without the horde of little Ceasars in Redmond compromising it first.
At a Windows XP Launch I saw two of the "techs" talking off to the side and i went up and asked them..."What was up with windows Me?!!!" They just looked at me and walked away...NOW during the XP Presentation that was very awesome and the demo locked up,,, and some one yells out "Thank God we all still have Jobs...LOL" we all lost it and i Still have two of the shirts
Keep Up the great content....
My first PC had Me preinstalled. I mostly used it as a gaming PC and for web browsing, and honestly I didn't have too many issues with it. I remember having trouble getting a no-name sound card working, but that's about it.
I got so angry after trying to get ME to work multiple times that I broke the cd in half and threw it out to stop myself trying to use it again.
My mom used a Windows ME computer in the early 2000s as a karaoke machine. She still has it and still works great. I’ve used it for many years and never had any issues with it.
Yes, Windows "Mistake Edition" was listed as #4 on PC World's list of "Worst Tech Products of All Time". My grandmother had it, and Volume Shadow Copy kept overwriting system files, thereby cannibalizing itself.
The history of Windows. Bad before Windows 7, bad after Windows 7. Done, that was quick.
You forgot bad Windows 7
I find it real hard to get over how bad ME was. I had it in 2000, and it crashed literally every day, multiple times a day. Crashing was its core functionality. I went to college with it and lost my whole hard drive in a particularly bad crash. It was devastating. There should have been lawsuits. Big ones.
ME has the honorary position of the best error message I have ever seen. Freely translated from the swedish distributed installation, it read:
"Unknown caused errors in Unknown. Closing Unknown."
Windows ME launched with Windows 2000 (NT 5, the version just before XP). Windows 2000 was rock solid. 2000 was aimed at Pro/business, ME aimed at home users.
To be fair to Microsoft they were on a roll with 95, 98, 98SE and then 2000. 4 operating systems, 1 every 1-2 years, and with genuine improvement with each version.
They was also when office would also genuinely improve with each version.
Linus Group, maybe have a look at what changed at Microsoft around this time to totally ruin software advancement there. It became a sluggish mess after this period, imo.
Giving me XP nostalgia with that tiny clip
I remember a PC I bought back in 2000 came with Windows ME. BSOD multiple times a day every day, even after being reinstalled on a monthly basis. I going assume Microsoft’s strategy with this atrocity was “this OS hasn’t gone past the software development alpha stage but let’s release it anyway”. Also remember system restore stopped working sometime in 2001 so I just turned it off. Not long after that before Windows XP was released.
I was extremely lucky back then. The vast majority of Windows ME issues came from poor drivers, but I somehow happened to have all the hardware that was fully supported, and never had the bad experience the entire world talks about. I guess Olidata made a ton of validation in the hardware choice before selling their PCs
Windows ME was the only OS that my dad skipped over entirely since purchasing our first PC from Gateway with Windows 95. He wound up upgrading our Windows 98 desktop to XP shortly after getting his first laptop that came with it.
This video is wrong about ME being because the NT kernel wasn't ready yet... it was, and it was called WIndows 2000 and came out around the same time as ME.
I remember when we went from DOS to ME. It lasted less than a year before our computer crashed for good. Lasted like 2 months before it started to throw fits. I'm also one of those unique ones that actually enjoyed Windows 8 quite a bit.
Oh the joys of ME and finding all your hardware gone when you went into the Device Manager. I quickly got my hands on XP and all was right in the world again.
With the amount of driver issues we've had on two computers after converting, I'm lately sooooorely tempted to give this aware to Windows 11...
And here I thought they were going to bring up Windows Bob. It failed even harder.
You should do a gaming pc from each era of windows and game on each of them.
Next topic : how fast is ram from the beginning to today
Also how fast are legacy ports all the way up to USB and thunderbolt
Back in the day, we called this Windows MEstake.
Man I will never forget the abomination of that start menu of windows 8