Fun fact: Just to show how much confusion there was (and still is) around Windows ME and 2000, the Windows ME Wikipedia article actually says *”Not to be confused with Windows 2000”* at the top.

Trying to coax Millennium Edition into working properly as a child literally set my career as a computer engineer

I think Windows ME shaped my professional career. When I was a kid I was already used to format the C drive, diagnose the programs in safe mode, creating recovery floppy disks, reinstall the system from scratch, install the drivers,... All that was a natural path to follow... Thanks Windows ME! 🙂

My older brother was all proud when he brought home a copy of ME to install on the home computer. He was hyping it up like it was the second coming. I think it lasted about 2 weeks on our computer. My mom literally told him to "get rid of this shit". We went back to 98.

The first family computer had ME. So I grew up thinking computers were all just unstable crash machines.

Because ME was my first OS I became very good at debugging OSs even today.

I was a computer science student at this time. Windows 98 was my first Windows ever. While more stable than ME, ME felt more modern and faster. However, it was very fragile and needed to reinstall it every 3 months. But I loved it. Despite the similarities between ME and 2000, they were never the same. 2000 was my first attempt with an NT-based system, and I felt it from the beginning. May be because computer was my specialty. But apart from that, 2000 was certainly not suitable for consumers. However, it was way more robust, smoother, and its UI was more advanced than 9x. XP made all that easier for consumers after that. I used ME for only a year or so, but it’s still very nostalgic for me.

A few notes from someone who remembers the era well: (1) Microsoft had been trying to move over to the NT line much earlier than this video implies. I knew people who worked at Microsoft and the original game plan was for Windows 95 to be the last (and only) consumer 9x OS, while Windows 3.51 was supposed to be the last strictly business oriented version of NT. Windows NT 4.0 was slated to become what XP eventually became- the version of Windows which merged the consumer and business lines.. As early as 1993, Microsoft had started taking steps in that direction with Win32s- an environment to run 32 bit programs in the 16 bit DOS/Windows 3.x environment. For various reasons, NT 4.0 never became the version of Windows which combined the two platforms. (2) Windows 95 was finally released to great fanfare. For the average consumer, DOS was gone, but those of us who understood the technology knew DOS was still there- you could even make it rear its ugly head by changing the config file so it would drop you into a DOS prompt instead of the GUI. Windows 9x used the same thunking technology that Win32s used and it could sometimes create instability. But consumers seemed happy with Windows 95 so Microsoft sort of delayed the move to consumer NT. Microsoft had bigger fish to fry such as the fact that they had been caught with their pants down when the internet was taking off and they weren't a major player (at that point). Besides, PC gaming was just starting to become a really big thing at that point and much of that was DOS games. The way Windows 9.x handled DOS programs was different than the way Windows NT handled them. The NT VDM was more elegant than the 9x solution, but the downside was that NT had little tolerance for games which tried to access the hardware directly- which was pretty much all DOS games. So Windows 98 was supposed to be the stopgap- one last DOS based Windows before it was merged into NT. (3) Until a few months before the release of Windows NT 5.0, Microsoft intended for it to be the first consumer release of NT. They had even named it Windows 2000 with a "Professional" and "Home" edition. Windows 2000 was actually the first version which provided an upgrade path from Windows 9x to Windows NT- you could upgrade from Windows 98 to Windows 2000. But the Windows 2000 Home edition was never released. Why? I remember upgrading from Windows 98 to 2000 and I was excited until the upgrade was complete and released my modem and sound card were not working. No drivers so I ended up buying a new modem and sound card. I had better luck with 16 bit Windows and DOS games, but it was maybe an 80% success rate- much better than NT 4.0, but still unacceptable for a consumer version of Windows at the time. (4) So Microsoft once again moved the line in the sand- Whistler (ie. XP) was to be the first consumer NT OS. Still, this left Microsoft with a long period (at the time) between consumer editions. Sure, Windows 98SE was as different from (the original) 98 as 98 was from 95, but that wasn't the public's perception. Windows 98 Second Edition was never marketed as a new version of Windows- it was mostly an OEM release while stores quietly replaced the old Win 98 with the SE edition. So the decision was made to release Windows ME. Somehow, ME and Vista are lumped together as the two worst versions of Windows, but that's where the similarities end. Windows Vista's biggest flaw was it was too much. ME's biggest flaw was it was just a bunch of shit basically all thrown together. Even after MS had decided that Whistler would be THE Operating System, they continued creating nightly builds of the Windows 9x line. Maybe the plan was to create some legacy OS for very very low end computers (or specialized markets like POS register systems). This OS became Windows ME and Microsoft knew it was the mistake edition from the moment it was released...

As a kid I remember my dad upgraded our PC with 98SE to ME. It lasted about a day before we reverted back to 98. Crashes all around, absolutely awful. Then when I got my own PC with XP in it, it felt like a quantum leap in every single aspect.

My first day college, I installed Windows ME on my PC, and it brought down the entire college network. After tracking down my PC as the source and running some tests, the IT department banned the OS from campus.

I loved the minimalism of windows 2000. To me, it was the best business OS.

I remember running an RC3 build of ME back in late 1999. It was fast, behaved well, and had a lot of really cool features. Somewhere between RC3 and Gold, MS really dropped the ball. Many of the new things did make it into XP though.

I can remember in high school I was trying to explain to my friend why Windows XP was better than Me. He really wouldn't budge. That was the day I learned about how stubborn narcissistic people can be. I wonder if he's still out there somewhere using Windows Me...

Amusingly as a kid, I never knew of Windows ME's existence. My family's computer went from 95 to 98 to XP (Before 95 I was too young to comprehend what OS they ran and beyond XP I was older and more aware of the situation, even having my own personal computer), so for a long time I just figured XP was the Windows OS after 98.

I lead a group that developed security software for Windows. We replaced core parts of the OS and shipped software tailored for each Windows flavor (W95, W98, W98SE, NT4, W2000). When ME came out we took a look under the hood, quickly realized that it was a technical disaster with countless bugs. Most machines we tried simply could not run it. So no support from us. I have always suspected that Microsoft intentionally torpedoed ME to kill off the W95 branch and move people on to NT. The reason people kept using W95/W98 was that it could run on the first generation single core Pentium machines and even 486es.For NT you needed to scrap your three year old PC and get a new one, which people did not want to do.

During Vista (!) time, I met a former senior manager for Microsoft. She told me that nobody in Microsoft *ever* mentioned ME, and referred to it as "that OS".

My friend's copy of ME decided to no longer run executables at one point. This was fixed by right clicking and hitting properties - just viewing them, not changing anything. Just a system that seemed at war with itself.

Windows ME was a misunderstood failure, for a lot of reasons. This video gets a lot right, but overplays the role of Neptune and Whistler. Most people didn't keep up on those things, and power-users knew the difference. If you knew what Whistler was, you also knew Me wasn't it. That's just not something I heard much confusion over at the time. Absolutely if you were just buying a computer and didn't read up on news (or rumors) about MS, like most people, you wouldn't have known moving to NT was a thing - I would guess most people at the time didn't know what NT was unless they had a reason to. It was never marketed to consumers, and was even discouraged for home use. First problem then, was the name. Calling the follow-up to 95 and 98 "Me", and the follow-up to NT4 "2000" confused a lot of people. I mean, they switched the numbered version, and the letter version's name - and a majority of people (aside from computer geeks) I knew at the time assumed Windows 2000 was the new Windows 95. I had awkward conversations trying to explain NT to people. People still believe 2000 was the successor to 95/98. Then, marketing. The OS sort of came out of nowhere, and 98se was still popular (it was still recent). With the name confusion already an issue, the marketing consisted of ads saying "Meet Me!" and touting things that probably weren't accurate (much like Vista's marketing). The big concern back then with consumers was two things: speed, and crashing. Everyone complained that their computer was too slow, regardless of how fast it really was, and crashing was 9x's biggest feature. So the question people would ask when a new thing came out was "will this make my computer faster?" Almost always. Pushing out a new version of Windows like this made people assume their computers would be faster (nope) and crash less (nope). Anyone who upgraded expecting those was gravely disappointed. Which is to say, pretty much everyone who installed it. The weird thing is, it actually almost was a great OS. Underneath, it was basically Windows 98 Third Edition. It seems more stable and actually less prone to crashes. I used it for almost a decade, and it worked great...however, I didn't use the normal version. More on that later... As noted, DOS mode was removed, while the DOS Prompt inside Windows remained. However, in reality, DOS was still there. As with most Me issues, the features were simply locked away, and if changed, would be "repaired" automatically, making them near impossible to use...but they weren't removed. An interesting side effect was that autoexec.bat and config.sys were still generated - but were blank. The system still needed them to exist. If you edited them, they would be blanked out again. The next issue was bloated software. The OS itself was still basically Windows 98, however many of the applications that came with Windows were replaced with new versions. Previously, Windows required I believe a Pentium 90. With Me, that suddenly jumped to a Pentium 350 minimum. Recommended was higher. Odd part being that the OS itself wasn't that different, with two exceptions. The first reason for the jump was the software being pointlessly bloated. Biggest example was Media Player, which now boasted features such as skins, and provided the same (actually fewer) functions as before, but requiring more RAM and CPU to load. Apps like CDPLAYER were replaced with placeholders that simply launched Media Player. If you upgraded, your familiar apps would be slower, do less, and were kind of tacky. You really needed a newer computer to handle them. One reason was competition from software such as RealPlayer, which in the late 90s was a major competitor to WMP. MS had a strategy of integrating free alternatives to competing software into the OS (like IE to crush Netscape, MSNMess against ICQ and AIM, etc). Real and WMP were fighting to see who could be slower and more bloated at the time. MS' strategy ultimately won out, nobody talks about RealNetworks anymore. (Tragically, WINAMP was better than either, and could run on a potato.) There was a change to the driver system, I don't recall too much there, but for the most part drivers still worked. Any time they change Windows, some old drivers always break, and people always get furious. Changing how drivers worked caused a lot of problems, which as usual, would be fixed with driver updates - though even that was impacted by the confusion with 2000 as to which version to update. Me's unpopularity and the arrival of XP meant a lot of drivers probably never got made. Obviously, hardware without drivers, or broken drivers, is going to wreak havoc on your computer, resulting in many complaints about Me. But the real culprit of Me's disaster was a little thing called PCHealth. Or rather, a bunch of things. For XP, MS intended a ton of new system tools to simplify or automate maintenance, for instance, System Restore. I feel Me was used as a prototype for these features - which were not quite ready for deployment. The OS would always be looking for changes, making backups, rewriting files it didn't like, monitoring everything - and it was bad at its job. My favorite glitch was when I played a DOS game which Windows decided was an important program, and tracked every single change it made. It would make backups constantly. After an hour or two, the game would be unplayable - often before that, I'd get a warning about low disk space, because every single action the software did that wrote to disk would result in backups - now this game which was a few KB was taking about 2 GB of space. This was a glitch in System Restore, which didn't work anyway. I don't recall ever once having a successful restore on Me, it always messed up. To this day, I don't trust SR because of it. Once again, PCHealth would undo any attempts to make the OS work properly - its job was ensure the OS stayed broken, and used a lot of resources to make that happen. This is where the slowdowns and crashes likely came from, the combination of bloated features, an automated maintenance system that didn't work, and bad drivers. I had an altered version, which did two things - unlocked DOS, and removed PCHealth from the system. I wish I remembered the details on it, but it's been over 20 years. With PCHealth removed, many but not all of the automatic things stopped, and the system was more responsive. For the applications, I cracked open the CAB files on a 98 disc and copied the old versions back over - most of the time it worked (but you had to be careful not to trigger Me's repairs, which would restore the broken software - you could never open Media Player, perhaps giving a hint as to what it was doing that made it so slow to load). After restoring DOS, removing PCHealth and System Restore and such, and restoring the features of 98se, and had the right drivers for everything, doing a clean install rather than an upgrade, what I had seemed like a smooth, more stable version of Windows 98. The potential was there. It could have been the best version of 9x, but I believe was really just trying to push people toward upgrading to XP by making 9x look more outdated than it was. Releasing broken software to push you to new software was also in MS' playbook, as was inflating system requirements to force upgrades. They still do this kind of thing today.

Back then anyone who understood slightly bit of computers, knew that Windows ME was based on a DOS kernel like the former Windows versions (except Windows NT). There was no confusion with Windows 2000 Pro (based on the NT kernel). The problems with ME were compatibility, stability, missing DOS mode, missing 3rd party software/driver support etc. But PCs that came pre installed with Windows ME, didn't had these problems, or at least not that prevalent.

Slightly off topic, one of the major benefits of 98SE, was the ability to strip the install down to just what you needed(for advanced users). That left 98SE actually very stable, something not seen again until XP - the stability I mean. Good video, thanks a lot, cheers NZCH

I was going from Jr. High into high school and parents were buying a computer at the Gateway store. I remember standing in a sea of cowprint boxes. I knew about XP and I remember being at the store that day, specifically asking if our new computer was going to come with Windows xp. The salesman assured me that it would, but it came with Windows Me installed. It was just atrocious. I knew someone else with a Compaq (probably presario) and they had just as many stability problems. It's crazy that even on an oem designed machine, which extensively should have all the necessary drivers to function well, Windows me was still a mess. But we used it until I went to college and bought my own laptop with XP. Pre-SP2 XP is like a rare unicorn now.

To be honest 12 year old me in 2000, probably wasn’t too bothered with issues in ME as long as there were games that installed and played, I was happy. And that Windows Media Player (with skins and visualizations) and startup sound are memorable to this day.

Fun fact : for two years straight, at the very end of the 90s, my father dragged my mother and I to see computers at the store. In 2001 he finally made his move and bought a top-notch Packard Bell desktop. Featuring the infamous Windows Me. I had a lot of fun learning to use it (Pinball 3D, love you forever), but as you said, it crashed constantly and the Restore feature quickly became the feature we used the most! We upgraded to Windows XP some time later, and it lived until 2006, when its motherboard fried up. And that, folks, is the story of a Packard Bell computer my family will never forget.

When I got my first ever PC it had Me pre-installed, and I remember feeling super smug because my friends had 98 and didn’t have the ability to burn CDs. For years I was convinced Me was brilliant but thinking about it now and watching this video, I think I’m just clouded by nostalgia, haha. Still, I’ll always have pretty fond memories of my first years online with that OS.

I remember Windows ME. When it crashed -- and it crashed often -- it didn't just crash. It crashed with prejudice, taking the filesystem along with it. I remember major disk corruption issues after a crash, many that required a re-install.

The ME actually stood for Major Embarrassment.

I called Windows ME 'Windows RE' for re-install. Usually that meant reinstalling Win98 SE. ME was just a huge crashfest.

I’m a Mac through and through. But I’ve binged your Windows videos and find these little history lessons fascinating. I’m somehow nostalgic for something I never had (except XP, which I absolutely loved).

I never ran Windows Me because in February 2000, I actually won Windows 2000 from a drawing that was held on the Internet in October 1999. I couldn't believe it! It came straight from Microsoft in the store box. I loved that OS. For me, it was Microsoft's best operating system.

Holy shit, when I was a kid a reletive died and left me with a Windows ME computer. I rmember talking about it like 5 years later and people told me "There's no such thing as Windows ME!!" I believed them and thought I was mistaking 98 or something. Cut to a decade later and this video rocks my world.

I had a pretty good experience with ME, didn't understand what all the dissing was about at the time and was in no rush to move to XP. Was never any confusion between ME and Win 2000 either.

Yeah, Windows ME was straight up broken. We were on Windows 95 for years and dad finally bought a new Dell that was loaded with ME, and that computer was nothing but trouble from the moment we booted it up. It held out for less than a year and eventually wouldn't even boot anymore. Then he bought a Compaq with XP and that stayed in use till after Windows 10 came out.

Windows 2000 is what windows ME SHOULD have been.

It was truly terrible. Crashed on me, reliably, every single day - something that hasn't happened since.

Minor nitpick: Windows Millennium Edition is actually pronounced Windows Me and not Windows M E. It's weird, yes, but that's according to the official marketing.

Nice video! I actually had more of a negative experience with Windows XP and Vista at first because they were shipped with computers that did not really meet their recommended system requirements; the computer my family had that ran Windows ME blazing fast totally tanked when we installed Windows XP on it. I eventually grew to love Windows XP when it was patched with service packs and installed on a faster machine; unfortunately I can't say the same for Vista. I've pretty much always disliked Vista.

Using ME was an exercise in patience, and probably helped me be better at problem solving tech issues.

As an enthusiast I never mixed up between ME and 2000. But I DO remember installing 2000 Beta 3 over ME after a very short time because it was just that buggy. (I couldn't afford the full version of Win 2000 at the time). Also fun fact: I mention the ME vs 2000 situation to my non-tech-enthusiast wife and her response was "those were 2 separate OS versions?". 😆

I had a computer buddy back then that actually disassembled the Win ME kernal and added Real (or) Dos Mode back into it in order to run certain video games, and it actually worked really well. Thanks for the video.

so this is only my second video of yours to watch, but im very impresed. So I subbed and liked :D also, my mom still tries to get me to put windows ME on her computers. She adored it and doesnt understand its totally not usable today under normal situations

My experience with ME was the worst of any OS I've used. In three instances, I had the OS become so unstable that I had to reinstall it. One time this was due to simply misclicking the hibernate button! As a high school kid before the age of cloud saves who couldn't afford a CD burner, it was extremely frustrating to lose all my files and data so many times.

Windows 2000 was so freaking good though, probably my favorite Windows OS of all time. I miss the old basic GUI so much. :(

Even nearly 23 years later, seeing ME again is enough to make my eye start twitching manically at the thought of an immediate blue screen of death, or spontaneously combusting device drivers, or unstable data connections….and so many more. I worked for a school IT department at the time, and the local authority insisted on having ME, since they were refurbishing all the schools IT rooms, wanted it to look up to date and all that jazz. They didn’t want 98 cos “It’s older” and didn’t want 2000 because it was too expensive. Yeah, you can imagine how that went! As soon as XP appeared, we purged that disaster from the systems as fast as physically possible!

Worst OS I ever used was Solaris. As an example, if you used the GUI to go to printer management, a GUI would appear, but so would a popup that said basically "By the way, this GUI totally doesn't work, so don't use it. Use the command line instead."

funny, I was 7 years old and got a first computer. It was preinstalled with ME. At that time, I did not have the Internet yet, and I believed that the concept of an operating system on ME was the pinnacle of genius. I played Mortal Kombat 4, painted in paint, played pre-installed card games. There were no problems for me with this operating system since it was my very first one.

Windows 10: Everyone gangsta till..... "AUTOMATIC UPDATE pops up"

I actually liked Windows ME back at the time. The issue I had with it was that the OS would detect different devices multiple times over multiple reboots and cause the dreaded blue screen of death. An easy fix was to go to device manager after a blue screen and remove all duplicate devices and reboot and the devices would only have the correct single listings and you wouldn't get any more blue screens until you rebooted enough times to get the duplicates back. An annoyance but other than that the OS was actually solid,

A bit part of why Windows Me was so unstable was due to the limitations of the Win9x kernel being easy to reach due to the increased demands of the shell programs included with the OS. Windows 2000 could have a systemwide limit of 16,384 GDI objects while the Win9x kernel only supported 1,200 max.

I remember the day I 'upgraded' my pc from 98 to me. I think it lasted all of a day on my setup as I was plagued with a painfully slow os, craploads of blue screens and the inability to run my dos games. This was followed by a reinstall on win98 🤪

I had used ME for a few times and yes, it's just a poor reskinned 9X OS, but with 2000 graphics. Nothing much of a good OS since I was more familiar at the time with XP which became an OS fondly remembered by a lot.

the only good thing that came from using Me was learning how useful it was to partition the C drive for software installs and keeping a separate partition for files I didn't want to lose in case of BSOD or something worse which would require a fresh OS install.

My grandmother’s computer had Windows ME and her computer caught the famous Volume Shadow Copy bug that began overwriting system files in the background and essentially eating itself up. I’m sure that was eventually fixed? Hard to say because ME had such a short shelf life.

ah, the memories. just waiting for midtown madness 2 to crash again and again... then, just a few years later, the quantum leap that was XP. hours of gaming without having to fear the constant crashing. sims 2, simcity 4, lego island (2)... i swear, those were the days.

I actually liked ME. I had used older hardware to build my computers, so it actually felt like an upgrade from 98se. When I went through 98 through XP, it really felt like a step inbetween. Eventually, I switched from windows to linux, and kept a windows partition with cygwin installed. However, I had a good experience with ME, and still believe it was a decent OS.

The major issue that caused ME to behave badly was drivers, since it dropped VxD drivers and the hardware manufacturers didn’t had enough time to test their wdm drivers.

Which voice generation tool do you use. It s good, only notice the synthesized voice on few vowels...

Man, I remember being 8 years old and still somehow understanding that 2000 and ME was a very confusing marketing situation

I used ME and I thought it was fine, I knew what I was getting (Windows 98 3rd Edition) another 9x. Today I use a lot of 9x legacy programs and ME is my OS of choice. I am in my 50's now and I love the challenge that 9x OS gives me. 95, 98se and ME, just waiting to add 3.1 or 3.11.

The only ME computer I ever had to deal with was my friends Compaq from Radioshack that had one of the first DVD players built in. Brand new he would need to usually reboot twice for the machine to recognize the drive. Was also the platform we used Napster on the most at the time. What a time it was.

0:56 Wait, are you talking about Windows ME, or Windows 11? Because that description works extremely well for *both* of these.

I don't know how old you are and your experiences, but I can remember setting up networks and multiplayer games at private LAN parties with ~40 people and cobbled together PCs and "network infrastructure" ~20 years ago. Win 98 SE worked, XP worked, 2000 worked and then there is this shout across the room "... you there with ME, don't do anything ... stay out of the network, I 'll set that up ... " and then after 2 hours, much cursing, many beers, more blue screens, desperate searches through driver CDs and diskettes the 41th participant joined the LAN. Fuck that shit! Though in hindsight, the power delivery setup was even more adventurous. The building from the 1880s, last time the electrical system was probably touched in the late 1950s after the soviets had "exported" all excess copper left in east germany. 40 Socket A/Pentium 3/4 gaming PCs with horrible PSUs and an equal number of 15" to 21" CRT displays, using extensions up to 50m/150ft to distribute the load around the outlets and breakers. A wonder that didn't end in a big camp fire with blue lights in the background.

The first computer I ever used came with Windows ME. It took like 3 days until it bricked by natural causes and we had to "downgrade" it to Windows 98 because ME simply did not want to be installed again and crashed every single time during installation, right around 90%. Never used Millenium again after that.

Great videos. Another thing to point out is, because Microsoft charges for the software, most people did not upgrade unless they absolutely had to. We had Windows 98SE, my aunt bought a computer that had ME installed on it, but we never had it. I got XP on our next computer. So with the way Microsoft operates, the majority of people would just skip over many versions of software & only get some of the more important/longer lasting OS's. We had Windows 3.1, Windows 95, 98SE, XP, Vista, Windows 10.

i won my first computer on a drawing contest. it had windows 2000 on it, almost none of the games i wanted to play worked on NT so seeing that loading screen still gives me a head-ache :D

Windows ME was the first OS my family computer had. My mom and I got it at a CompUSA and I was soooo stoked to be getting my first PC only to end up with that travesty of an OS 😭 Also this OS is what I had to train my old school Mexican mom how to use a computer for the first time since I learned that in school and my god was that torture with ME.

I feel like having your creation called "ahead of its time" is a huge complement.

As someone who was building, selling, and servicing computers for consumers and businesses in 2000, few people purchased retail WinMe. Almost nobody was upgrading from 98 to Me. It mostly came as a OEM bundle with new PCs at the time. We always installed Win2K on new builds no matter if it was for business or not. Usually we would replace Me with Win2K when we serviced computers in the shop or out in the field as the cost of it was cheaper than the labor to constantly be fighting with it. Shortly afterwards XP came out which resolved the issue. BTW we hated the way WinXP looked at first, calling it Windows FP (for Fisher Price).

I'm using WIndows ME in my PC at college year back in 2000 as my main OS. And I know from the start, ME was update version of Windows 98se aka 9X series that I did use before since Windows 95 and I still love that. Everyone like my IT lectures, friends, tech fellow and others among the times know that 2000 was updated version of NT (work, network & business) and ME was 9x (entertainment & gaming). That two became main Windows OS until XP release and take over. Btw, I did use ME for offline works, college study and gaming. And that was still good with some tools & tweak.

My first OS was Windows 2000 on a tablet. I recall upgrading the RAM to 512 MB and was amazed at the speed

One feature I remember about Windows millennium Edition was the ever-present memory leak bug that seemingly never got patched

I used ME for a couple of years. It was fine and stable...no BSoD. Felt like a good improvement over 98.

I remember a friend had an HP desktop that shipped with windows me. And I was amazed how quickly it booted 'hybernate' i didn't know then

Something I never understood about older computers... What's the point of uploading different versions for home and business?

I remember playing games on my family’s computer running Windows 2000, I must’ve been like 4 years old. At some point the computer apparently broke and we didn’t have a computer for a long time The next computer I used on regular bases was my dads laptop running Vista in 2007. I actually liked that OS.

My brother wasn't into computing, until i shared my Windows 98 PC on Xmas day, 1998. We surfed for three hours. He became interested and bought a second hand PC with Windows 95. He and I used AOL for dialup at this time. It needed to uninstall and reinstalled AOL several times. This was simpler to do this than fiddle with settings. He jumped to ME and it was unstable. He followed my advice and bought a DELL i5 PC.

Windows: Mistake Editon

I grew up with windows me and it wasnt as bad as people paint it out to be. I never got the chance to use the internet with it but as a child I didn't even know what the internet was so I cant speak for every feature. I played many types of games without any issues and the only complaint I had was when the fan would start to sound like a jet engine.

When one of my Laptops ran Windows 8, I was stoked at about how bad it looked. The full sized start menu was a mess. Searching for stuff on the OS was also bad and I was happy when I got the upgrade to Windows 10 for free at the time. So yeah, I could say that Windows 8 was the worst OS I ever used.

My families first computer was a Compaq with a 700MHz AMD Duron, 64MB of RAM (Upgraded to 192MB at some point) and Windows ME. We must have been lucky to have had just the right hardware configuration and software used because I don’t recall any major stability issues. Sure, it BSODed occasionally, but it didn’t seem any better or worse than my friends 9x machines. I actually recall more stability issues a couple years later when we got a PC running XP. Eventually XP would go on to be the GOAT, but our first year or so with it wasn’t great.

I was there, as an IT professional at the time. Consumers could've taken the change to NT core (and ME as a transitiom) and that would'nt have been an issue,. The problem was that no gaming studio was prepared to switch to NT because they expected to carry on using the hardware hooks that they expected to. Since that's what the devs expected, that's why it was a mes.

Everyone: "Windows Me is the worst Windows OS ever created!" Windows 8: "Hold my beer"

Personally I didn't have any experience with Windows ME, so this video was an interesting topic to see. The most experiences I had was with Windows 95, 98/98SE, 2000 (through School), XP, Vista, 7, 8 and 10 and for me, things were all okay, only annoyances I had were the confirmation pop-ups when you wanted to do something in Vista, but that's the only problem I had with it.

Interesting video! Thanks for posting! Yep! I bought a Sony Vaio in 2000 having Windows ME. It was pretty bad, boarderlining on disgusting. I recall early on having over 40 hackers logged on to my system. After it being trashed by a trojan, I promptly installed Windows 2000.

windows 10 had an issue where the sound would be mute for 5 seconds,whenever you play a video or audio file which irritaed me. now using windows 11, i don't have to put up with the sound issue i had on my previous laptop. also Windows Vista was my first time owning a laptop

i still remember that beautiful point where i got to install windows XP and i found out that it appearently wasnt the norm to get a bluescreen 2 or 3 times per play session and that a game crashing doesnt mean you always have to hard reboot. XP really felt like the second coming of christ to 10 year old me

The best new Feature was that me supported plug and play mass storage devices. So you could just plug devices like usb sticks in it and it would install the driver automatically.

I'm not sure if this was created by somebody that was actually there at the time, but feel free to correct me. It was quite obvious at the time that Microsoft at the time was trying to turn Windows into more of an operating system and less reliant on DOS. You noticed this by the number of features that they used in Me to replace things that 98, even 98SE, did in a DOS mode set up. A good example of this was defrag which was fairly quickly done on 98 in DOS mode but was sluggish in the extreme on Me using a windowed program. Now that didn't mean that the problem was because it was windowed, but it does show that whatever was being programmed was not running as it should. There were lots of similar problems. The biggest problem, however, was that Me shared the same issues as Windows 95 in that drivers were either missing, incompatible or easily corrupted and while Windows 95 can be excused because of what it was, Me can't be. The video constantly states that the 9x, or as I tend to refer to it the MS-DOS, kernel was outdated and unstable, but that overstates the issue of that time. The kernel was, after all, merely MS-DOS as it had been developed to run under Windows with all the various extensions needed for the GUI that started with 95 including the various win32 extensions. The video mentions that many folk installed W2K after having problems with Me but that wasn't always the case as it wasn't unusual for users to reinstall the much more stable 98SE. The video also mentions XP, but XP wasn't as stable straight out of the gate and didn't really become stable until the service packs came out. Actually SP2 was a huge exercise in code replacement! To be honest, the problem wasn't that any of the systems were necessarily bad; the problem was marketing, as usual. At the end of the day, the year 2000 (which is NOT the start of a millenium, it's the END - unless you can prove that 0 was a year of course! :) was a date like any other and it was only the marketing folk that insisted that we have something to mark it with, probably with a few to raking in the cash. Programming doesn't work like that, as you would have seen with the Longhorn development cycle for one. And Microsoft never learns from its mistakes. It also rarely admits to them. It took about a decade or so for them to admit to Me being such a blunder and they have yet to own up to Windows 8. And now it seems that they are going down the same path with Windows 11, the OS that they originally stated they would never publish!

In 2001 I joined an engineering firm as their software guy. My boss, and electrical engineer, kept referring to the newest edition of Windows as "Windows 2000 Me". He was actually referring to "2000" in the office, and "Me" in his home.

It came pre-installed on my 'e-machines' PC, the badge saying "Specially designed for Windows ME !". I can honestly say I never had any problems with it. It wasn't until 20 years later that I discovered it was supposed to be $hit.

- Timestamps - 00:00 Introduction 04:04 The Reasons Behind The Failure Of Windows Me 04:43 The Development Of Windows ME 06:06 The Confusion About What Operating Systems Microsoft Was Working On 07:17 The Marketing Of Windows Me 08:08 The Release Of Windows Me | The Timeline Of Windows Operating Systems From 1995 To 2001 09:28 The Lack Of Windows Me's Capability 10:10 Why Windows 98 Second Edition Didn’t Receive The Same Amount Of Hate 11:33 The Last Nail In The Coffin | The Removal Of DOS Mode And The Repeated Amount Of BSOD's And Crashes 12:39 The Lack Of Time To Release Windows Neptune | The Cause Of Windows Me Being Rushed And How Behind It Was 13:36 Windows Me's New Features 15:27 Conclusion 16:12 Outro/Endscreen/Patreon Supporters

That is what led to Windows XP being the greatest O.S. and lasting over 7 years - even longer for people like me that hated Vista and refused to upgrade to it because it drained your computer's resources. I used XP for 10 years and loved it. XP was less than 700MB and had all you needed - can you believe an operating system less than 1GB. I had a stripped version that was only 279MB and I could still use it today without missing anything. XP was a special operating system that will never happen again.

By late 97 I was starting a repair, maintaince, upgrading PC´s bussiness, the first copy I got of Windows Me was an upgrading one, if you wanted to install it, first of all Windows 98 or 98 SE had to be already working on the PC. It worked flawlesly, fast and very reliable, it was so good that once it was on my PC I only had to reinstall everything six months later (and at that time I was testing a lot of software and hardware on my bussiness), very different from the one that you could install from scratch.

Windows Me was the lost episode of Windows

Windows ME had integrated graphics acceleration when compared to Win98. For me, at that time, I saw a huge increase in fps in software mode for HL, Q2 and games ran in ME while they didn't in 98 such as AwP gold. If you took some time to set it up, it was a superior experience to 9x. The real drawback was the installation size when compared to 9x, which was at least 2 times greater if I remember correctly.

I remember my computer back then was using Windows 2000 since my computer engineer cousin set it up for my family. I felt left out because all my friends were on Windows ME and I actually never knew it was bad until now. But it makes sense now since they all upgraded to XP immediately but 2000 worked great for us so I didn’t use XP until the mid 2000s. There was a lot of feeling left out for a good part of my adolescence when it came to computers because I had Windows 2000.

I was just starting highschool when I got Windows ME. I've never had so many bluescreens in my life, before or after. One of my friends described it as "crashing IS the operating system"

Tbh, my family (my dad more specificly) introduced me to computer really easly: I was 4 and I remember windows 95 explorer. Of course 98 was the next, but then we got 2000 cause dad knew Me was "useless junk" as he said

My brother actually had a good experience with Me back in the day.

This was a home OS for my family for a long time up until it lost support and updates and by the end it felt okay compared to the first updates. Not great, but enough to work with. But we also weren't doing anything heavy with it

windows me's main problem were the flakey drivers for hardware at the time..built a pc recently and installed me with the latest drivers...been rock solid, zero blue screens it just runs and runs well