WinME was a real resource hog, especially if you were running any legacy software. It got to the point where I was crashing at least once a day. The only solution I found was to run something called Jibreel AntiCrash, which of course took up resources as it ran in the system tray. However, it completely removed the BSoD and made it more like what happens when XP has a fatal error.
Gah! USB problems!
My last computer had 4 USB 1.1 ports. Two in the front and two in the back. I had a USB mouse, keyboard, and scanner. When I tried to hook up a USB printer, the computer would go berserk! I tried several different combinations. Occasionally, the scanner would only scan in blue. I had to uninstall the software and reinstall it 3-4 times a year.
Of course, this may have been the computer’s fault.
For the second time tonight: anecdote != data.
However.
I bought a low-end computer pre-loaded with 98 and the fucker crashed daily. I installed ME and it crashed weekly. Is one better than the other? I don’t know. All I know is that the less I have to press ctrl+alt+del the happier I am.
Excuse me while I take a moment to get down on my knees and suck up to my brand new Dell with XP…
I see a lot of comments here about WinMe being a “resource hog”, which isn’t *quite *the case. It didn’t take up resources any more than it’s predecessors, but rather it failed to release resources when apps were closed.
So after running just a few apps (even background updaters, system apps and the like) it just ran out of power and started to crash. Hence all the BSODs.
Here’s a reference. As far as I know that promised patch never did come, and MS dropped support for WinME quickly.
I had ME on my first real home PC and hated it.
I’m I the only poor bastard still running ME at home?
Point well taken - actually, now that I think about it (haze clears), that was probably the worst thing about ME, and relates directly to ftg’s point about it being a rush job.
No, I run Windows ME at home too. I bought my Dell desktop in December 2000, and I still use it to this day. I’ve slowly been spoiled by cable modem after years of AOL dial-up, so my computer seems just fine to me. I’ll probably keep it until it totally crashes and dies, but I haven’t had any major problems over the last several years.
No (he sheepishly admits).
Actually, Microsoft wanted to “merge” their two operating systems starting with Windows 2000. They didn’t actually merge anything. They killed off the Windows line and forced everyone to NT. The problem was that when they did it, quite a bit of software wouldn’t run on 2000, especially games. Halfway through the development of 2000 they realized it wasn’t going to work, so they switched gears completely and started saying 2000 was for business users and they would come out with a new OS for home users (which would become ME). You can see some evidence of this in Windows 2000. They replaced “Network Neighborhood” with the more cutesy “My Network Places” and put in a few features related to multimedia that were definately targeted for the home user, but when it came out they were going to great pains to say it was for business users and not home users.
Now they had to shove ME out the door. The main purpose of ME was not to provide new features for the user, but to help them “transition” to the NT line. This is why you can’t boot into DOS mode in ME even thogh DOS exists in ME. NT doesn’t have DOS so to help you get used to not having DOS they intentionally crippled it out of ME. They threw in a few features (mostly they ported the stuff they were going to put in 2000 for the home user) so that the customer would actually buy it, and shoved it out the door. That’s why ME sucks so bad. It was hastily thrown together and released, and was designed as a transition OS.
Fast forward a bit, and out comes XP. By now the folks who write games and such know that microsoft is dead set on killing the windows line, so everything since 2000 has been released has been written to work with 2000. Note that XP underneath the hood is essentially the same as 2000. Generally speaking, anything that won’t run under 2000 won’t run under XP either, though they do have the compatibility modes in XP which help a little (supposedly - they’ve never helped me). So, all of the games and home suff that wouldn’t run under 2000 (remember, this is the reason they didn’t “merge” the operating systems when 2000 came out) still won’t run on XP, but these are older games now and microsoft’s opinion is tough luck, you’re going to XP whether you like it or not, and you shouldn’t be running old crap anyway. They didn’t quite word it like that, though.
This isn’t quite true. Windows 9.x/ME operating systems used DOS as a boot loader, but once the OS was up and running it was a true OS, not a fancy DOS shell. When it accessed the disks, for example, it did it using its own drivers. Windows did not call DOS to do the disk accesses for it (unless that particular drive was stuck in DOS compatibility mode for some reason).
The main structural difference is the existance of HAL on NT machines. HAL is the hardware abstraction layer. This is what stands in between your program and the machine. In 9.x machines, there is no HAL. If your DOS program or windows program wants to directly screw up the machine, it can. This is what allows a mucked up program to take out the entire OS with it when it goes south. HAL on NT machines stops the program from directly accessing the machine, so that when an errant program goes south, it only takes out itself and the OS remains standing. HAL is also the main thing that breaks compatibility with older software (computer game: “I’m going to directly access your video card!” HAL: “I’m sorry, I can’t do that, Dave.” - program goes BOOM).
I liked your description of ME being a car with the hood welded shut. That’s about the best one line description I’ve heard for ME.
By the way, this is how the operating systems identify themselves, as opposed to how microsoft’s marketing teams named them. It helps to de-mystify a lot of what is really going on:
Windows 95 = Windows 4.0
Windows 98 = Windows 4.1
Windows ME = Windows 4.9
Windows NT 4.0 = NT 4.0
Windows 2000 = NT 5.0
Windows XP = NT 5.1
I’m just curious then — does anyone know how Vista identifies itself?
Hopelessly futile nitpick: “DOS” stands for “disk operating system” and is a generic term. BSD is a DOS, Linux is a DOS, all the Mac OSes are DOSes, etc.
Microsoft’s DOS is called MS-DOS.
It’s like people saying the brand of vehicle they drive is “car”.
+1. I had my hard drive wiped and started over with ME - so I started clean. Whenever I had more than 3 apps running, it would simply crash. Several times a day. One of the app’s was ACT! - a contact management software that is a RAM hog, apparently but that was no excuse given the RAM I had.
I switched the exact same machine to XP, and have run it for 2 years now - it has crashed maybe 3 times total and at least 2 of those were for understandable reasons…
WinME sucked huge donkey dick. That is all.
Shorthorn 0.01 
More seriously, ME sucked for all the reasons everyone else has given:
[ul]
[li]You couldn’t boot into DOS mode even though ME is still a DOS shell. This is the worst of both worlds: You can’t use your old programs because they need a full DOS to run in, yet you don’t get any of the advantages of having a VMS, er, WNT kernel.[/li][li]It’s patronizing as hell. W95, because it was a DOS shell that acted like a DOS shell, allowed the experienced user to load a reasonable command line and get things done. WME doesn’t allow anything of the sort. If you can’t get it done through the graphical wizards, you can’t do it.[/li][li]It’s closed-off. In W95, you could ignore the GUI and treat the whole thing as a 32-bit DOS and run your own DOS-based environment on top of it. In WME, MS’s ugly, limiting shell is all you get…[/li][/ul]
I should be grateful to WME, though. In a backhanded way it gave me a huge gift. WME convinced me that Windows was only getting crappier with time and that I should look for a different OS to spend most of my time in. Red Hat Linux 7.1 worked like a champ on my craptastic Compaq desktop and some Linux version has been my most-used OS ever since.
I agree completely: That was a hopelessly futile nitpick 
I bought a couple of machines with ME when it had been around for six months or so; I found it significantly less stable and usable than 98SE, for reasons including:
-The implementation of scandisk - rather than running a low-level, DOS-type scandisk on improper shutdown, ME tries to boot into the GUI and run the graphical version, which is often not at all fine if there actually is a disk error affecting the Windows environment.
-The user-friendly bells and whistles; probably a nice idea, but a lot of the extra features seemed to consume lots of resources, bringing the system to its knees rather more often than I’d consider reasonable.
-The dumbing-down; most of these features could be turned off or set back to the same as they were in Win98, but it was annoying and inconvenient to have them there as part of the default installation.
-System restore; don’t think this existed in 98SE; it was there in ME, always seemed very flaky and it never did anything but completely knacker the smooth operation of the machine, in my experience. I’d never have trusted it enough to revert to a previous restore point.
That’s like saying people should not say “PC” to refer to their Dells and Compaqs and Alienwares and whatnot. Because it stands for “Personal Computer” and that could mean a Mac or an Amiga. You should say something like “IBM-legacy compatible clone PC”. You should reserve saying just “PC” for those occasions when you’re differentiating your Personal Computer from the IBM 3090 mainframe and the three VAXen in the living room, or the Cray in the basement.
Hogwash. Of course Linux and MacOS are “disk operating systems”. What the hell other kind of operating systems would they be, tape-cartridge operating systems? People say DOS for the same reason they say Word. (Microsoft is just the bloody brand name). None of the other contemporary operating systems use the acronym DOS except for a couple that are intentionally and almost totally compatible and run the same application software.
NT 6.0.
Minor interesting note:
Internally, due to non-MS code expecting the version of windows to be 3.x, windows 95 actually returned 3.9 as the version in some cases instead of 4.0.