I recently tried to download Quicktime and Itunes. Neither program is supported by Windows ME. What’s the deal?
That it’s about 5 years out of date?
Because it has all the pitfalls of Windows 98 and none of the benefits?
Well, if you use that argument, so is 2000 and XP.
I don’t know what make ME so fundamentally different from 2000 and XP, but I know that it just plain sucks as an OS.
Because it was the worst Operating system out of Microsoft for Bugs since Windows 3.0
ME was based on the Win95/98 code. 2000 and XP were based on the WinNT code
WinME is buggier than '98. I ran it for a year and a half or so. About four months before the release of WinXP I couldn’t bloody wait to switch to the new OS, 'cos WinME has become incredibly unstable and slow. (And I’m pretty computer savvy so I know all about maintenance and precautionary measures; didn’t matter to WinME. The very act of installing and/or uninstalling hardware and/or software is enough to give it paralytic siezures eventually)
XP on the other hand has been rock solid for me since I first installed it.
I don’t know what its underlying problems were, but when I had Me, I don’t think I went a single day without my computer needing to be rebooted because it had an unrecoverable crash or just simply locked up. Even 95 and 98 weren’t that bad.
I’ve had XP running now for about four years, and I think my reboot average is less than once a year.
I have installed and used WinME in the past (but I didn’t inhale) - my impression of it is that it is more buggy and unstable than Win98SE, probably worse even than Win98 plain.
In a nutshell, Microsoft needed to release a ‘home’ OS to run alongside the ‘pro’ release of Win2K; they weren’t ready to release an NT family home OS, so they took Win98, hastily bolted on some NT-esque features (such as System Restore), as well as a whole bunch of touchy-feely wizards and pseudo-locks on folders (i.e. if you browse to C:\Windows, you get told that you have no business snooping around at the file system) etc.
Trouble is that it just didn’t work very well; the ME implementation of System Restore is resource-voracious and doesn’t seem to work very well anyway; the wizards were just insulting or limited in scope. Most of the bells and whistles that made ME different from Win98 did so by making it worse.
Scandisk is a case in point; Win98 and its predecessors ran a DOS version of Scandisk after an improper shutdown or if disk corruption was detected; AFAIK, the NT Family runs a console version too, very early in the boot sequence.
ME tries to boot into a full GUI and then runs the GUI version of scandisk; of course if your disk is knackered, chances are it will never get that far.
There have been those who have suggested MS deliberately did it as an attempt to deal a death blow to the Win9x family. Not sure I believe that.
Windows ME was real crap. It has roughly the same user interface as 2000 and XP but it was a completely different architecture under the hood. It was the last of the DOS - Windows 3.x - Windows 95 - Windows 98 - Windows ME lineage. Microsoft was corect to scrap that family and start with the stable NT core.
The crashes were frequent, but my fondest memory of my old ME box was the fact that every time I disconnected a DUC it would stop my keyboard from working. Which would require a reboot to fix. Which was especially annoying when I actually wasn’t the one who’d disconnected, I’d just dropped out and then had to reboot each time I wanted to get back online.
Actually, now you mention it, I do recall some horrendous problems with device management; on more than one occasion, I uninstalled some piece of hardware from Device Manager and on rebooting, it went through the process of detecting everything -motherboard, processor, disk controller, etc - all over again, as ‘new hardware has been found’
I had ME on my previous computer. For the first year or so, it was fine as long as I remembered to reboot the computer at least 2 or 3 times a day or at those numerous inopertune times that it simply froze up. My computer had a DVD player and a CD burner which could both function as a CD reading device. Well, one day, out of the blue, ME could no longer find the DVD player. It wasn’t listed in the device manager. It was just…GONE. I did absolutely nothing. But I still had the CD burner so I didn’t panic. Two days later, the CD burner also disappeared. It, to, was just…GONE. Absolutely nothing I tried could get them back. Not even replacing the CD burner with a new one. ME would not even see that one. The only thing that would have fixed it was to reinstall the operating system. But that was on a CD. For all practical purposes, it was nothing more than a boat anchor. So I gave it to a guy that claimed he could fix it. (He did finally get it fixed. But the only thing that was the same as what I gave him was the case.) I bought a new Dell with XP and it is still going strong.
Microsoft used to have two lines of operating systems. There was the “windows” line, which (ignoring versions 3.x and earlier) is 95, 98, and ME. Then there’s the “NT” line, which is NT 4.0, Windows 2000, and XP.
The “windows” line is backwards compatible all the way to DOS. This leaves them with a fatal flaw in that they allow programs to completely take over the computer and directly access hardware. A really misbehaving program is therefore able to not only kill itself, but take the rest of the OS and anything else running with it. The “NT” line protects you from this by not allowing programs to directly access the hardware. Everything on NT must go through the operating system to access anything. This is great from a stability standpoint. In fact, it’s one of the things that makes NT so much harder to crash than the “windows” line of operating systems. The down side is that older programs that directly access hardware don’t work very well (or, usually don’t work at all) under NT. The important thing here is games. Games under “windows” operating systems often directly accessed hardware so that they could run faster. Under NT, this is a big no-no.
Around the time of Windows 2000, Microsoft decided they don’t want to support two lines of operating systems. They decided to “merge” the two lines. There isn’t any way to merge two completely different design philosophies, so all of this “merge” talk was a pile of crap. What Microsoft wanted to do was kill of the “windows” line and switch everyone to NT. Windows 2000 was going to be the operating system that would do this. Part way through development of Windows 2000, microsoft realized their grand scheme wasn’t going to work. Too many games and such just wouldn’t run under NT, no matter how hard they worked on the hardware emulation and access. So, part way through the development of windows 2000, Microsoft switched gears completely. Windows 2000 was for “business” users only (the main users of NT), not home users.
This left Microsoft with a problem. They had just eliminated half of their customers from their next software release, and they really didn’t want to go through all of the effort of making another version of “windows”. So, what they did was they took windows 98 and threw in as many features from 2000 as they could with a minimal amount of effort and called the resulting piece of crap Windows ME. They also intentionally took out or crippled some features of 98 that weren’t in 2000 just to get users used to what they would be having when they were finally forced to NT. A good example of this is DOS mode. Windows 2000 is built around NT, which doens’t have DOS built into it like the “windows” operating systems do. So, you have all of the negative effects of having DOS compatibilty in your operating system (like misbehaving programs still totally mucking up your system) with few of the benefits since they’ve been intentionally disabled.
There are a lot of other bugs and stability issues in ME that are a result of Microsoft just quickly throwing the thing together and shoving it out the door. If they had put more development effort into it, then it wouldn’t have been so buggy, which is obvious because if you download the umpteen million patches for ME it’s actually just as stable as win98. But the fact that you do have to download the umpteen million patches to do this is a pretty good indicator that Microsoft just didn’t put much effort into it, especially compared to 2000, which was really put through the ringer before it was released. It is very clear that ME was a rush job, and probably deserves its reputation as being a total piece of junk.
With the release of XP, Microsoft officially killed off the “windows” line. We’re all running NT from here on out, like it or not.
If you look at how the operating systems identify themselves, instead of how the Microsoft marketing weenies identify them, you get a clearer picture of what is 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
From this it should be clear that 2000 is a major overhaul compared to NT 4.0. ME, despite being hyped as the same overhaul to the 9.x line, is actually just a minor change. XP, also despite being hyped otherwise, is actually a fairly minor change to Windows 2000. XP had a dramatic change in the user interface, with very few changes at the core of the OS. ME was sort of the same. They changed a lot of what you see on the screen, but didn’t change much at all underneath the hood from 98.
I’m STILL running Windows ME on my 5 1/2-year old Dell Dimension desktop. 
ME = twice the crashes, and half the functionality of Win 98
I do have to say though, that I did keep ME around for a while - for some reason, we couldn’t delete it from the HD of the system that we had, which was an old HP prebuilt box. So we partitioned the HD and made a win2k/ME dual boot system. It was useful to have ME hanging around to run all those old DOS games that 2k refused to talk to…
I had ME crash while I was installing it once.
Only once?
