Thanks for getting the history right. ME was literally demanded by OEMs, MS did not want to make it and it was rushed out the door in about a year start to finish. I was hired in 1999 to work on the Neptune kernel, moved to ME for 9 months then to XP all in a three year span. Not fun going crunch mode to crunch mode to crunch mode like that.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I have some old cd's of various builds of Neptune. Also, the code for ME actually added dual cpu support but it was commented out of the released builds due to lack of time for testing. Oh and immediately after ME shipped we were all split between XP and windows embedded and all of the 9x team disbanded aside from support so OEMS couldn't ask for another 9x spin.
@@MissNorington My work on all three OSs was centered on ACPI support, on ME I owned testing of third party audio and video drivers specifically. One reason it has so few inbox drivers is that there was no time for bug fixes so if a bug was raised and the device was not shipping in a OEM system that fall, the driver was simply cut. ME actually is remarkably stable....as long as you run it on a computer sold between November 2000 and June of 2001.
@@ReflexVE That's really interesting. There happens to be a whole community that's interested in researching these old builds and reporting their findings in the process, myself included. For the longest time, we've only had access to build 5111 from December 1999. We really only know about the existence of other builds thanks to file version references from various builds of Millennium.
If you want real-mode MS-DOS support functional in ME (that means, bootable into Windows GUI as well), just use the official binaries in the LTOOLS folder of the OEM CD-ROM. No patching is needed. Retail doesn't have it, only OEM.
I think MS-DOS 8 wasn't finished, as the developers didn't see any purpose to develop it further like other operating systems. Therefore, it is a good thing to release the source code for other people, who are interested to do so :)
I wonder if there are Russian bootleg versions of Windows ME in which those Russian bootleggers swapped out the original crippled version of MS-DOS 8 with a unofficial uncrippled version. Time Will Tell.
As always, fantastic work, well explained. Thank you. As an absolute retro fan, I'm already asking myself: What for? But it's incredible what the cummunity deals with and what extraordinary solutions they come up with.
Actually, yes, me. I used to always call it „M E“, as in the german-speaking area, I never heard it any different by anyone. I guess the „Me“ thing didn‘t transport well into german.
I tend to think of it as the third revision of windows 98, although I know that's not entirely accurate. There was windows 98, windows 98 Second Edition, and then Windows Millennium Edition.
Me was a mess. Unlike NT line that provided a lot of improvements for the price of breaking DOS compatibility. Me took away DOS and gave very little instead.
When reading up the history on Windows Me, I understood they just shifted it in because Neptune didn't fare, and Whistler (XP) was still too far away. From a technology point of view, Me didn't really advance anything.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR At that time I was dual booting Windows 2000 and 98. 98 for older games and 2k for everything else. My point is that 2k Pro was already perfectly suitable for desktop use. They didn't have to wait for XP to be ready. Adjusting 2k licensing, so it would be affordable for home user, would be more than enough.
@@pvc988The DOS/Gaming compatibility it was ... I had NT4 as my desktop OS since 1996, still dual-booting with 98/98SE. Wenn Windows 2000 came, I was pretty much done with DOS games, and well into Quake III Arena and the like FPS, which ran just fine on Windows 2000.
If I had a company in 2001, I would have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for breaking DOS compatibility. The NT line has caused a lot of problems with driver and software compatiblity. Imagine getting a new PC in 2001 running Windows ME, migrating all your software and applications to it, then deciding to upgrade to Windows XP and then having the computer unusable because of kernel change, interrupting software and hardware functionality.
I was still young in my computer years during the Me/2000 era, 12-13 or so, but i remember vividly when my cousin gave me a 2k disc "that already had the key built in" (naive piracy on my part lol) and I i won't forget the stability and smoothness NT afforded a home user. I hadn't missed DOS in a while at that point, and it was a flex to have a "server OS" to my friends at the time. Fond, fond memories.
Can't believe I'm I didn't find this video until now! Great stuff man! One thing that has always intrigued me about MS-DOS 8 is that I've read it's faster in some circumstances (I get the feeling this is more so related to booting Windows vs actually running DOS apps) and has a smaller memory footprint than previous builds of DOS. It would be cool to test it against MS-DOS 7.1, 6.22, and, heck, maybe even IBM PC-DOS 7/2000, the latter of which is said to be the most memory efficient "modern" DOS. While I'm sure some of the patches, such as the IO8EMMOK, will negate some of the memory benefits of MS-DOS 8, the extra conventional memory combined with Windows 9x compatibility just might make MS-DOS 8 worth using in certain situations.
Excellent video & subscribed! Last year i had a go at restoring dos on WinME & after running the DOS patch - ran into the issue of windows not loading after running SYS C: to test its ability to redo the boot sector in case of corruption. Turns out that io.sys from the Emergency boot disk in conjunction with the SYS command (one with the version check removed) results in the machine asking to 'remove the emergency boot disk and restart' Turns out that it was due to an incomplete msdos.sys file being created from this process so copied over a more complete edited one from Win98SE and this solved the problem, the modification changing one line to read WinVer=4.90.3000 & of course making sure the ifshlp.sys was present in config.sys as well. Problem solved! Next step was adding the full dos support for running games etc, eg device drivers and the like. Turns out that the compulsive built in limited XMS manager embedded in io.sys caused a lockup with himem,sys and/or emm386.exe trying to load. IO8EMMOK.SYS loaded fixed that with emm386 so sweet... Full dos support back, excellent but this caused issues with trying to load Windows itself, turned out that EMM386 being in memory with the particular system I was running at least was the key issue so in the end I made up a custom boot menu to choose to boot in either configuration and problem solved! Also turned out Windows ME itself provides EMS memory support for DOS games launched from it anyway and with a VxD driver loaded for a compatible sound card, full DOS sound is available too! To simplify the above, i made up some batch files to run off the system boot disk I made up eg: does the system transfer, deletes msdos.sys and copies over the full correct msdos.sys and copies over a preconfigured autoexec and config file for the boot menu and done! Later on came across the 'Full' io.sys, the largest sized one with the boot logo as well as boot to dos ability. This one creates a full and complete msdos.sys when you use the sys command, this one too like it's EBD version contains the compulsive XMS manager as well so still need to make the needed adjustments. Been running this WinME setup on two of my retro machines plus a virtual machine & it's been running great!
Have you seen @Adventures In Nostalgia 's videos on MS-DOS 8? "Extracting MS-DOS 8" - th-cam.com/video/cERRbC8zW_Q/w-d-xo.html "Installing MS-DOS 8" - th-cam.com/video/gSQLAO-kPfg/w-d-xo.html
It's an interesting endeavour. With DOS functionality installed, are there any benefits to running Windows Me over 98 SE in terms of hardware or software compatibility?
I guess not. Seeing how much crippled MS-DOS 8 was, and how much effort it takes, to restore real MS-DOS mode back, it's of course way easier to take 98 SE. Windows Me doesn't really anything (except the UI refresh and some graphical tools), but was in other ways a stepback. And of course, today it's not so much an issue anymore, but doing all these hacks back then would always expose you at the risk of being broken after the next Windows patch day.
I was young and inexperienced when I first tried Windows Me in 2003. DOS compatibility or not, I liked it regardless and had a hard time acclimating to Windows XP.
i had windows ME. i remember after i disabled all the tsr's and shit that ran in the background it was rock solid. i never had a problem with it once all that shit was disabled that tried to run at startup.
I might give this a go on my Windows Me only PC, and hopefully have some actual success unlike the last time I attempted to get DOS mode working. I've found that only Windows Me or Windows 2K/XP run reliably on it.
I find it so much easier to run Windows 98 and then patch in the windows me user interface. The UI enhancements is really the only thing I care about anyway
@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I think my response got deleted because I put a link in it maybe? Just do a search for 98SE2ME. Anyways, I find it easier to do the unofficial Windows 98 updates, then install ie6 which is required for the ME UI, then the me ui. I then use resource hacker to replace the start menu Banner and the winver banner(bmp files in explorer.exe and shell32.dll) the only win me system files I use are Defrag and scandiskw. Win me Defrag is much faster. I copy those in manually
Was watching this video and had to do a double-take when I heard my name mentioned. I'm iMic over on the MSFN forums, but I post most of my updates on Overclockers Australia these days. The Real Mode DOS environment package I threw together was a fairly rough proof of concept at best, and eventually if it were carried to completion it would have had in-place patching (or at least files to cover all the different languages), some further updates to system files, and an uninstall feature included. I wasn't able to overcome the issue of Windows Me lacking the necessary code or function to drop back into a command prompt after shutdown though, like "Restart in MS-DOS Mode" in Windows 98 would, or "Use current MS-DOS configuration" when launching an application from a PIF file. I have some other Millennium-related projects in the pipeline, so experimenting with Real Mode DOS support is currently on hold, but perhaps I'll have another look into it at some point. That said, I'm not all that experienced when it comes to x86 Assembly, which is where I suspect we'll have to head next if we're going to make any more progress with this one. If I manage to get back into it, I'll stop by the Github and help out.
Greetings, iMic! :-) For a rough PoC it was already very solid, I must say! You did a splendid job there! Adding more jelly onto it was fun, the in-place patching is now conceptually there, some localization support as well, plus the uninstaller and the missing format command. I'm hoping to properly fix the System File Protection madness next, as that's really a bugger and will get in the way when tampering around with other protected files. Let me know should you resume, I'm more than happy to help.
Can I help at all? I write embedded software (mostly in C) for a living. I don't have any experience programming on Windows (9x or NT) at all, but I'd love to help see this project through.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thanks, I tried to make it at least somewhat polished before it went out. Admittedly I did get the documentation a little wrong in regards to System File Protection - what I meant to say was that it gets around the "file is in use by Windows" error dialogs that would appear when attempting a drag and drop replacement from Explorer (or a COPY replacement from DOS). SFP is where I'm currently getting stuck as well. I have another revision of the Update CD in the works to replace the aging 2.2 release ("Windows Me Update CD" on the Internet Archive), but SFP has been causing some problems when installing a large number of updates at once, particularly on fast systems. It would be brilliant if we could figure out how to create the Security Catalog files needed to install updates into place, and would open up a lot of possibilities going forward, but I wonder if this will be more difficult than it sounds. I think they were signed with Microsoft's own code signature, but I'm hazy on the details. Even so, it is Windows 9x - not the most secure platform - so there may be some kind of way around it. With SFP out of the way, we could look at tackling the low-level Windows stuff needed to make Restarting in MS-DOS Mode work properly. That might be trickier still, but if it's not possible to do, maybe there's a workaround solution that would get us most of the way there.
@@micbr508Creating the catalog file shouldn't be the big deal, but signing it 🙂 Why don't you join on github.com/gpdm/TPC-WinMe-DOSMODE I'd love going deeper into it. I'm currently working on a video on OS/2's trapdoor, and dual-booting Windows 9x and OS/2. Had Windows Me a fully working MS-DOS Mode (one, that does exit right away with the current config, not implying a reboot), then it would work as well. But no, it has to be complicated ... ;-)
In Windows Me, yes. But be careful not to confuse it with Windows 2000, which is a different thing. Win95, Win98/SE and Windows Me all built on MS-DOS as a foundation. Windows NT/2000/XP/and everything beyond is NT-based, so in fact doesn't build on DOS. Everything up and until Windows 11 still had the 16-bit NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine), with a DOS 5 derived subset for the DOS subsystem, but this was only there for compatibility and was not a fully-featured DOS in it's own right.
That's a very specific request. Without MSDOS.SYS processing, you still want to be able to set the default paths and options since those affect how the system will boot. The logo can't be removed (without crippling the boot process of Windows), only hidden by that option in MSDOS.SYS
@@asanjuas Give or take, the source code doesn't have FAT32, or Windows 95, 98 support. The boot menu is buggy in 6.0. It even lacks the important code of DoubleSpace that was part of 6.0 because of that "issue" that Microsoft ran into that eventually resulted in version 6.22
Given that MS-DOS 8 is incapable of Real Mode, you could make a disk image with a Windows 98 boot disk, or a Windows 98 DOS bootable USB, CD-ROM, or use a second computer. Then you could install Windows 98 and Windows Millenium together, and two BAT scripts that run/enable either 98 or Me, and rename themselves to prevent renaming WINDOWS and Program Files for each OS, they could be WinME.bat or Win98.bat. If you boot to DOS with a Windows 98 boot disk and heve Me and 98, you have the full and most modern 9x system, you can use Windows 98 to ru programs that detect Me and refuse to run and to have full DOS.
The alternation between good os and bad os by Microsoft give some more money because people stay on the older release and then they have to pay money to upgrade without downloading the next version
@@weegeenumberone2 Vista was a resource hog. Microsoft gave me a free license key for Ultimate and I still only used it about 3 months before downgrading to XP. Every other release of Microsoft's OS seems to suck. 8/8.1, Vista, ME. It's yet to be foreseen if 11 is as bad as the others.
Pro-tip: use a slower CPU for emulation in 86Box, because it's a low-level emulator and it's for fast emulated systems very demanding on the host CPU. You can run OS/2 without performance drops and with moderate speed inside 86Box. Same for Windows 95. In this case: slower is faster (in the context of emulation).
One could ask AI to rewrite new Windows 98se/ME kernel with SMP and other modifications along with ME io.sys no-himem modification with real mode. Also with Nvidia/ATI-AMD opengl drivers for old systems . Even with WINE for DOS.😁
@@msdosm4nfredOh my ... ein ex-DDR Rechner? Wir haben das ENTER Museum hier in der Schweiz, die haben zwei Robotrons in der Ausstellung, leider nur "on Display", und nicht in Betrieb. Hab so ein Ding erst einmal Live in Betrieb gesehen. Bitte gut drauf aufpassen! ;-)
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Tja, ich gehöre zu den wenigen Leuten, die das Privileg hatten, anno '89 geboren zu sein und sich besonders mit der IT-Hostorie aus dem eigenen Land auseinanderzusetzen. Meine weitere Jagd geht nach Bulgarien, wegen den Prawez-Rechnern, die sollen besonders interessant sein im RGW-Raum.
Es sei noch erwähnt, dass mein Erzeuger damit geflext hat, unschuldige Leute an der Mauer einfach abgeknallt zu haben. Dafür schäm ich mich seit meiner Geburt anno 1989. An den Robotron kam ich anderweitig per Kontakt zur Sowjetunion, mein Modell ist ein Exportmodell, welches ich wieder reimpotiert hatte. Das Original hatte keine ISA-Slots gehabt, das Modell, was ich reimportiert hatte, hat echte ISA-Slots
Hahaha ... It's arguable wether it's too odd already to scare people away, or to make them remember. The name has a long-lasting history behind, as explained in the channel description. And that's why it is, what it is, the channel with the intentional odd spelling. Having said that, your interpretation made me laugh. I'd wonder if there's more people coming to that same conclusion. It never occured to me.
The MS-DOS 7.1 distribution, which was assembled by a group of people referred to as the „China DOS Union“, is a fake product. There was never an official release of MS-DOS 7.1 by Microsoft. The DOS contained in that distribution of course is still the real thing, as these guys essentially extracted the MS-DOS 7 files from Windows 98 and bundled it to a standalone MS-DOS 7 distribution. So fake in the meaning of „not an official Microsoft product / distro“. It’s still the real MS-DOS 7.1 from Windows 98.
@tezcanaslan2877 Yeah, sometimes the video links via the YT info popups seem to not show properly. This is the previous video I did th-cam.com/video/Iofa_2bnQiA/w-d-xo.html You'll find it as well at the very end of the video description.
It‘s anyway just a bit of an urban legend about he cycle IMO. It depends heavily on how and which version you count. For me, Win10 was running just fine without troubles for years, and now does Win11. I avoided Win8 like pest, but mostly for the sh*** UI.
If you count 98SE and 8.1 then it works from 95. 11 is definitely better than 10, it's faster than 10 on my Celeron tablet and very stable too, never crashed once.
not really, 11 is the OS equivalent of putting a fresh coat of paint on an old rusty car without first removing the rust sure its got a brand new look, but for power users the fact that everything is held together with code ductape becomes apparent quite quickly. also 11 is just straight up missing many features 10 had like the option to change taskbar height
It depended. When running Windows Me with then-current / new hardware, staying away from legacy hardware, and thus VXD drivers sometimes dating back to Win95, then it could be very stable. Technically, Windows Me still could use the VXD drivers, and people using Windows Me as an upgrade to older boxes, that were already around with Windows 95 or Windows 98, really had a hard time.
Why do you keep patching the various files for there version check. Because ms-dos came with at TSR to do it for you, known as SETVER. With setversion you could spoof the check with any dos version number it wanted to hear. How about that Microsoft provided a workaround for their own problems.
I'm aware about SETVER, but that doesn't always cover all eventualities. On a boot disk, which may or may not have a CONFIG.SYS yet, there's simply no guarantee SETVER is loaded. And it's a total throwback, if you want FORMAT /S or SYS the C: drive and need to fiddle around with SETVER first. Also, if you simply copy over files, without bothering for a CONFIG.SYS yet, it's just practical to not needing to care for SETVER, especially when a FORMAT.COM or SYS.COM was taken from a previous DOS version as in this example. Also, as far as some of the demoed patches in this video are concerned, not all of them are concerning version checks, but other bypasses. So SETVER won't help there anyway. Neither won't SETVER help for things Windows DLLs to be patched for version checks, as they wouldn't care at all what SETVER says. I could give you even another example why patching is just a blunt necessity, although that's from IBM's PC DOS. When merging PC DOS 7.1, which was never a full release, with the files of PC DOS 2000 (= PC DOS 7.0), to make it a complete release, you *must* patch SETVER yourself. Because PC DOS 7.1 didn't have SETVER, and in order to make the PC DOS 7.0 SETVER working on 7.1, you must patch it. Only then you could start using SETVER, to have it fake the DOS version for the other 7.0 utilities. In the end, such patches are there to simplify things.
I think all modern versions of Windows are the worst versions of Windows ever. The last good Windows was XP and even that had the beginnings of MS anti consumer behavior. I have a retro XP machine I keep for playing older games for compatibility. It was starting to give me some trouble (it's over 20 years old) so I decided to strip it down, clean it, new thermal paste, lube the fans, replace some caps on the mobo. A quick overhaul. I changed NONE of the hardware but when I reassembled it I did put the expansion cards (sound, USB 2.0 upgrade card, Wifi) back in different PCI slots then they were originally in. Upon booting, XP told me that my hardware had changed and that I had to reactivate Windows. RIDICULOUS! NOTHING CHANGED! Just different slots! I looked at a photo and switched the cards back to where they originally were but at this point it was too late. I had to call MS with a 10 mile long code number and reactivate or I would have been locked out in 3 days!!!! What happens years from now when MS no longer offers this reactivation service? Behavior like this is why on modern systems I don't run Windows. Windows is a horrible bloated mess with a UI that is so screwed up it still uses a combination of MS new clunky modern UI yet still contains UI elements and dialogs that date all the way back to Win95 even today in Windows 11! And it's full of spyware always reporting home on your activity.
Six reasons why Windows ME was better than Windows XP: 1. It was built on the MS-DOS kernel, not the plagued Windows NT kernel which was incompatible with almost every piece of software written for a Windows 95-based PC. 2. It started up faster than Windows XP, again, because of the complexity of the plagued Windows NT kernel. 3. It had more features than Windows XP Home Editon. You can logon onto a domain unlike Windows XP Home Edition which completely yanks out that feature from an NT-based operating system. 4. It could be tweaked to run like Windows 98, mitigating the crashes and bugs Windows ME had, and it would STILL work better than Windows XP. 5. It was faster than Windows XP. Windows XP is a bloated version of Windows 2000, which was already slower than Windows 9x/ME because of the plagued Windows NT kernel. 6. It had better driver support. Windows XP was notorious for driver incompatibilty on a NEW COMPUTER and did not have support for any of the legacy drivers which were designed to run for Windows 9X/ME. This was my experience when upgrading from Windows ME to Windows XP. Everyone continues to claim that Windows ME is a bad operating system but they forgot how bad Windows XP was when it was first released.
I used Win ME from around 2000-2005 and it was really not as bad as some people claim it was. I used it precisely for Win 9x/DOS compatibility and because Win XP was quite resource intensive when it first came out.
Dude, tell me you're a hater without telling me you're a hater 😄 For real though, you're exagerrating. For many people Win XP worked very good out of the box. Without buying a new computer for it. That's (also) why sooo many people remember it so fondly. Did you install pre-release versions, or what ? For my case, I remember that in Win 98 the dialup modem was quite a chore to install the drivers for. I don't remember the details, but it was something like first installing manually (choosing from a huge list) some enumerator then doing something else, and only then adding the driver or something like that. It took multiple tries to make it work. When I upgraded to WinXP, the modem worked out of the box, I didn't had to install anything. I remember that WinXP did have higher requirements, but other than a very slow Morrowind (IIRC I had 128 MB of RAM and for WinXP they recommended 256) I don't remember being affected by it. Because of the modem part, when we upgraded to WinXP it gave us the confidence boost that it's a good OS and we never looked back, never felt the need to go back to '98 or Me. It was actually the smoothest upgrade of an OS we had back then, but I think that's more down to luck. Still, if it was SUCH a "plagued" one, luck wouldn't have matter much.
@@Winnetou17 I'll tell you I'm a hater without telling you I am a hater. I had Windows XP as my main operating system for 10 years, from 2002 to 2012. In fact I still have computers running Windows XP Professional. So yes. This clarifies why I am a "hater". Now for the history story. My family bought a brand new Dell Dimension 8100 in late 2001. It was running Windows Millennium. At the time, I didn't know anything about kernels. All I know is that Windows Millennium was the next version of Windows. I knew back then that Windows 2000 was around, but I never had a copy of it therefore I didn't bother to look into it. Anyways, all I know is that everything from my old computer migrated. Everything worked. DOS games worked, Windows games worked, CD Burning was new and was amazing to make my own audio cd, yes the system hung at times, but this was the case with my older computer running Windows 95 and 98. Now, in 2002, upgrading to Windows XP Home Edition using a coupon which came with my brand new computer. We spent the 35 dollars, got the XP Home upgrade CD from Dell, then upgraded. Everything broke. Games wouldn't run properly, DOS games hung the entire machine, hardware kept hanging the entire system, it was an absolute nightmare. I got a second hand scanner (I don't remember the model number) but it connected to the parallel port, it hung the entire system, with Windows ME it never did this. In 2003 I was told by Dell technical support that DOS games were not compatible with Windows XP. I didn't understand why. I only found out in 2005 about the DOS vs NT kernel, that Windows XP was built on NT, which is the main reason why nothing worked after the upgrade. Your story on the Dial Up mode, I can relate this to a 3rd party modem being impossible to configure in Windows 98 back in the year 2000. At one point I was afraid to reinstall Windows with the risk of losing drivers for it. I never had this experience because the Dell 8100 had the Lucent Win Modem software which configured it automatically, so it worked flawlessly both in Windows ME and Windows XP (XP had preinstalled drivers for this). It sounds like you lucked out with driver support because the dell consumer based systems were absolutely terrible in this regard when upgrading to Windows XP. Also in 2005, I deployed active directory in my environment. The reason is to have a user have their documents on each computer redirected to the server. I was disgusted how the Home Edition of Windows XP completely yanked the feature out. Windows 95 98 and ME had this feature where you could log into the domain and have My Documents redirected to the server. Microsoft sure knows how to make things completely inconvenient for consumers. Fortunately in 2004, doing a clean install of Windows XP Professional SP1 without installing the Dell bloatware, and removing older hardware like that scanner, ditching DOS programs, made Windows XP usable. We ended up dual booting Windows ME and Windows XP. There was always some charm going back to ME while keeping XP for everything else.
@@judenihal You certainly got the short stick there. In my case, we didn't use any domain features (we only had a single computer, and that one was a SH one bought in '98, it originally was from '96, but we did upgrade most of the components by the time XP came). We also didn't paid anything for the Windows itself, in that time piracy in our country (Romania) was very common. I'm sure that even companies, small ones especially, had mostly pirated software. Though it was about then when it started to diminish. Yeah, so on those fronts I certainly cannot disagree. But I don't remember having that much problem with DOS games. Probably I simply didn't played them much then, and probably got SP2 in the mean time. I don't remember. But I do remember playing Warcraft III a lot, once we got a GPU (I literally had the game installed and not running for months until we got a 3D video card, lol). Same with Quake 3, but that one I played much less, as it already kind of run its course in the prior years.
@@judenihal thank you for your comments, I don't understand all the hater-aide that gets poured on WinME, I honestly believe it comes from people who NEVER experienced it AT ALL. It was practically Win98"c" / Win98 Third edition! I got a lot of milage out of it, even used it as a server to share a DSL internet connection which was EASY to configure. People look at XP with rosey glasses and YES it was good but when people refer to "good" XP they FORGET they are refering to SP2 / SP3, not the first shipment.
I'm an italian as well ;-) I do use EN software mostly, except sometimes when different language versions expose different behaviour, or in this case, where I decidedly wanted to test the patches and the patchset on the german version of Windows Me. Most of the time I hope the added narration and highlight segments should cover up for the context, even if the captured footage is in a different language.
Thanks for getting the history right. ME was literally demanded by OEMs, MS did not want to make it and it was rushed out the door in about a year start to finish. I was hired in 1999 to work on the Neptune kernel, moved to ME for 9 months then to XP all in a three year span. Not fun going crunch mode to crunch mode to crunch mode like that.
Oh, first hands information then 🙂
Do you have any particular oddities to share?
What did you do for ME? Seems like there were a lot of development with the WDM drivers (instead of VxD) and also that whole removal of MS-DOS?
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I have some old cd's of various builds of Neptune. Also, the code for ME actually added dual cpu support but it was commented out of the released builds due to lack of time for testing. Oh and immediately after ME shipped we were all split between XP and windows embedded and all of the 9x team disbanded aside from support so OEMS couldn't ask for another 9x spin.
@@MissNorington My work on all three OSs was centered on ACPI support, on ME I owned testing of third party audio and video drivers specifically. One reason it has so few inbox drivers is that there was no time for bug fixes so if a bug was raised and the device was not shipping in a OEM system that fall, the driver was simply cut. ME actually is remarkably stable....as long as you run it on a computer sold between November 2000 and June of 2001.
@@ReflexVE That's really interesting. There happens to be a whole community that's interested in researching these old builds and reporting their findings in the process, myself included. For the longest time, we've only had access to build 5111 from December 1999. We really only know about the existence of other builds thanks to file version references from various builds of Millennium.
Your videos are really good! Thank you for your hard work on them.
Thank you, glad you like it!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I agree, the amount of work (including research) you do for each video is incredible 👍
@@doslogoThanks for the appreciation! :)
really interesting stuff! I've still yet to mess with ME properly.
If you want real-mode MS-DOS support functional in ME (that means, bootable into Windows GUI as well), just use the official binaries in the LTOOLS folder of the OEM CD-ROM. No patching is needed. Retail doesn't have it, only OEM.
I think MS-DOS 8 wasn't finished, as the developers didn't see any purpose to develop it further like other operating systems. Therefore, it is a good thing to release the source code for other people, who are interested to do so :)
I wonder if there are Russian bootleg versions of Windows ME in which those Russian bootleggers swapped out the original crippled version of MS-DOS 8 with a unofficial uncrippled version. Time Will Tell.
As always, fantastic work, well explained. Thank you. As an absolute retro fan, I'm already asking myself: What for? But it's incredible what the cummunity deals with and what extraordinary solutions they come up with.
🙂
"What for?" We all love MS-DOS and Windows (sometimes a little bit too much) 😋
@@doslogoHopefull not just DOS and Windows, but all the other OSes as well. I find some love for all of them. Retro Heart!
Anyone else think of "Me" as "M E"? Maybe I didnt respect it enough to find out how Billy Boy wanted us to say it.
Actually, yes, me. I used to always call it „M E“, as in the german-speaking area, I never heard it any different by anyone.
I guess the „Me“ thing didn‘t transport well into german.
"Meh" is probably the correct way of saying it.
@@dinitroacetylen or in german, „ne!“, which is kinda a „never in my life, thanks, but no thanks“ ;)
I tend to think of it as the third revision of windows 98, although I know that's not entirely accurate.
There was windows 98, windows 98 Second Edition, and then Windows Millennium Edition.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR 🤣
Me was a mess. Unlike NT line that provided a lot of improvements for the price of breaking DOS compatibility. Me took away DOS and gave very little instead.
When reading up the history on Windows Me, I understood they just shifted it in because Neptune didn't fare, and Whistler (XP) was still too far away.
From a technology point of view, Me didn't really advance anything.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR At that time I was dual booting Windows 2000 and 98. 98 for older games and 2k for everything else. My point is that 2k Pro was already perfectly suitable for desktop use. They didn't have to wait for XP to be ready. Adjusting 2k licensing, so it would be affordable for home user, would be more than enough.
NT had years to improve. ME had....14 months.
@@pvc988The DOS/Gaming compatibility it was ...
I had NT4 as my desktop OS since 1996, still dual-booting with 98/98SE.
Wenn Windows 2000 came, I was pretty much done with DOS games, and well into Quake III Arena and the like FPS, which ran just fine on Windows 2000.
If I had a company in 2001, I would have filed a lawsuit against Microsoft for breaking DOS compatibility. The NT line has caused a lot of problems with driver and software compatiblity. Imagine getting a new PC in 2001 running Windows ME, migrating all your software and applications to it, then deciding to upgrade to Windows XP and then having the computer unusable because of kernel change, interrupting software and hardware functionality.
Windoze CE + Windoze Me + Windoze NT = Windoze CEMENT
Super stable lol
lolll
"Designed to sink employee morale and weigh computers down like a stone"
I was still young in my computer years during the Me/2000 era, 12-13 or so, but i remember vividly when my cousin gave me a 2k disc "that already had the key built in" (naive piracy on my part lol) and I i won't forget the stability and smoothness NT afforded a home user. I hadn't missed DOS in a while at that point, and it was a flex to have a "server OS" to my friends at the time. Fond, fond memories.
Not sure how you have so few subscribers... Your videos are great. TH-cam suggest this one to me, and I'm glad it did!
Thank you! Appreciated :)
Can't believe I'm I didn't find this video until now! Great stuff man! One thing that has always intrigued me about MS-DOS 8 is that I've read it's faster in some circumstances (I get the feeling this is more so related to booting Windows vs actually running DOS apps) and has a smaller memory footprint than previous builds of DOS. It would be cool to test it against MS-DOS 7.1, 6.22, and, heck, maybe even IBM PC-DOS 7/2000, the latter of which is said to be the most memory efficient "modern" DOS. While I'm sure some of the patches, such as the IO8EMMOK, will negate some of the memory benefits of MS-DOS 8, the extra conventional memory combined with Windows 9x compatibility just might make MS-DOS 8 worth using in certain situations.
Fun fact: Windows XP x86, and Vista x86 has the same GUI 9x files
Excellent video & subscribed! Last year i had a go at restoring dos on WinME & after running the DOS patch - ran into the issue of windows not loading after running SYS C: to test its ability to redo the boot sector in case of corruption. Turns out that io.sys from the Emergency boot disk in conjunction with the SYS command (one with the version check removed) results in the machine asking to 'remove the emergency boot disk and restart' Turns out that it was due to an incomplete msdos.sys file being created from this process so copied over a more complete edited one from Win98SE and this solved the problem, the modification changing one line to read WinVer=4.90.3000 & of course making sure the ifshlp.sys was present in config.sys as well. Problem solved! Next step was adding the full dos support for running games etc, eg device drivers and the like. Turns out that the compulsive built in limited XMS manager embedded in io.sys caused a lockup with himem,sys and/or emm386.exe trying to load. IO8EMMOK.SYS loaded fixed that with emm386 so sweet... Full dos support back, excellent but this caused issues with trying to load Windows itself, turned out that EMM386 being in memory with the particular system I was running at least was the key issue so in the end I made up a custom boot menu to choose to boot in either configuration and problem solved! Also turned out Windows ME itself provides EMS memory support for DOS games launched from it anyway and with a VxD driver loaded for a compatible sound card, full DOS sound is available too! To simplify the above, i made up some batch files to run off the system boot disk I made up eg: does the system transfer, deletes msdos.sys and copies over the full correct msdos.sys and copies over a preconfigured autoexec and config file for the boot menu and done! Later on came across the 'Full' io.sys, the largest sized one with the boot logo as well as boot to dos ability. This one creates a full and complete msdos.sys when you use the sys command, this one too like it's EBD version contains the compulsive XMS manager as well so still need to make the needed adjustments. Been running this WinME setup on two of my retro machines plus a virtual machine & it's been running great!
Have you seen @Adventures In Nostalgia 's videos on MS-DOS 8?
"Extracting MS-DOS 8" - th-cam.com/video/cERRbC8zW_Q/w-d-xo.html
"Installing MS-DOS 8" - th-cam.com/video/gSQLAO-kPfg/w-d-xo.html
Nope, but I‘ll have a look
It's an interesting endeavour. With DOS functionality installed, are there any benefits to running Windows Me over 98 SE in terms of hardware or software compatibility?
I guess not. Seeing how much crippled MS-DOS 8 was, and how much effort it takes, to restore real MS-DOS mode back, it's of course way easier to take 98 SE.
Windows Me doesn't really anything (except the UI refresh and some graphical tools), but was in other ways a stepback.
And of course, today it's not so much an issue anymore, but doing all these hacks back then would always expose you at the risk of being broken after the next Windows patch day.
I was young and inexperienced when I first tried Windows Me in 2003. DOS compatibility or not, I liked it regardless and had a hard time acclimating to Windows XP.
i had windows ME. i remember after i disabled all the tsr's and shit that ran in the background it was rock solid. i never had a problem with it once all that shit was disabled that tried to run at startup.
7:19 "Notfall wird gestartet ..." ("emergency will be launched ...") 🤣
Yeah, german translation for software sometimes … 🙄
I might give this a go on my Windows Me only PC, and hopefully have some actual success unlike the last time I attempted to get DOS mode working. I've found that only Windows Me or Windows 2K/XP run reliably on it.
I find it so much easier to run Windows 98 and then patch in the windows me user interface. The UI enhancements is really the only thing I care about anyway
Did you impose any particular tricks to achieve this?
I never bothered about the UI too much.
@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I think my response got deleted because I put a link in it maybe? Just do a search for 98SE2ME. Anyways, I find it easier to do the unofficial Windows 98 updates, then install ie6 which is required for the ME UI, then the me ui. I then use resource hacker to replace the start menu Banner and the winver banner(bmp files in explorer.exe and shell32.dll) the only win me system files I use are Defrag and scandiskw. Win me Defrag is much faster. I copy those in manually
This is fair, for general 90s computing Win 9x is the easiest way about it. But sometimes, you wanna watch the world burn. Or use Windows Me
@scoutkirby1764 I've tried. At least on a particular system of mine. Win me isn't friendly.
Was watching this video and had to do a double-take when I heard my name mentioned. I'm iMic over on the MSFN forums, but I post most of my updates on Overclockers Australia these days.
The Real Mode DOS environment package I threw together was a fairly rough proof of concept at best, and eventually if it were carried to completion it would have had in-place patching (or at least files to cover all the different languages), some further updates to system files, and an uninstall feature included. I wasn't able to overcome the issue of Windows Me lacking the necessary code or function to drop back into a command prompt after shutdown though, like "Restart in MS-DOS Mode" in Windows 98 would, or "Use current MS-DOS configuration" when launching an application from a PIF file.
I have some other Millennium-related projects in the pipeline, so experimenting with Real Mode DOS support is currently on hold, but perhaps I'll have another look into it at some point. That said, I'm not all that experienced when it comes to x86 Assembly, which is where I suspect we'll have to head next if we're going to make any more progress with this one. If I manage to get back into it, I'll stop by the Github and help out.
Greetings, iMic! :-)
For a rough PoC it was already very solid, I must say! You did a splendid job there!
Adding more jelly onto it was fun, the in-place patching is now conceptually there, some localization support as well, plus the uninstaller and the missing format command.
I'm hoping to properly fix the System File Protection madness next, as that's really a bugger and will get in the way when tampering around with other protected files.
Let me know should you resume, I'm more than happy to help.
Can I help at all? I write embedded software (mostly in C) for a living. I don't have any experience programming on Windows (9x or NT) at all, but I'd love to help see this project through.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thanks, I tried to make it at least somewhat polished before it went out. Admittedly I did get the documentation a little wrong in regards to System File Protection - what I meant to say was that it gets around the "file is in use by Windows" error dialogs that would appear when attempting a drag and drop replacement from Explorer (or a COPY replacement from DOS).
SFP is where I'm currently getting stuck as well. I have another revision of the Update CD in the works to replace the aging 2.2 release ("Windows Me Update CD" on the Internet Archive), but SFP has been causing some problems when installing a large number of updates at once, particularly on fast systems.
It would be brilliant if we could figure out how to create the Security Catalog files needed to install updates into place, and would open up a lot of possibilities going forward, but I wonder if this will be more difficult than it sounds. I think they were signed with Microsoft's own code signature, but I'm hazy on the details. Even so, it is Windows 9x - not the most secure platform - so there may be some kind of way around it.
With SFP out of the way, we could look at tackling the low-level Windows stuff needed to make Restarting in MS-DOS Mode work properly. That might be trickier still, but if it's not possible to do, maybe there's a workaround solution that would get us most of the way there.
@@micbr508Creating the catalog file shouldn't be the big deal, but signing it 🙂
Why don't you join on github.com/gpdm/TPC-WinMe-DOSMODE
I'd love going deeper into it.
I'm currently working on a video on OS/2's trapdoor, and dual-booting Windows 9x and OS/2.
Had Windows Me a fully working MS-DOS Mode (one, that does exit right away with the current config, not implying a reboot), then it would work as well. But no, it has to be complicated ... ;-)
ahh so it was there all along, and all my friends saying that there was no dos whatsoever in there
In Windows Me, yes.
But be careful not to confuse it with Windows 2000, which is a different thing.
Win95, Win98/SE and Windows Me all built on MS-DOS as a foundation.
Windows NT/2000/XP/and everything beyond is NT-based, so in fact doesn't build on DOS.
Everything up and until Windows 11 still had the 16-bit NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine), with a DOS 5 derived subset for the DOS subsystem, but this was only there for compatibility and was not a fully-featured DOS in it's own right.
I remember asking for IO.SYS from ME's Developer's Release back in 1999, to see/learn how DOS was removed, and also, I had no friends back then :P
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR yes in fact there Is a small program that allows 16 bit ntvdm programs to run on win 10
Now for someone to make an unofficial Windows ME ISO version with the restored MS-DOS functionality. (5:12)
I must admit... I need the spanish versión of msdos 7.10 patched without logo and without msdos.sys processing.
That's a very specific request. Without MSDOS.SYS processing, you still want to be able to set the default paths and options since those affect how the system will boot. The logo can't be removed (without crippling the boot process of Windows), only hidden by that option in MSDOS.SYS
@@doslogoyes but there is way to make any other msdos using the leaked sources from MSDOS 6.0 which are 21 mb and are complete.
@@asanjuas Give or take, the source code doesn't have FAT32, or Windows 95, 98 support. The boot menu is buggy in 6.0. It even lacks the important code of DoubleSpace that was part of 6.0 because of that "issue" that Microsoft ran into that eventually resulted in version 6.22
Hasn't there already been a DOS 8 boot floppy somewhere? I seem to recall using it a long time ago.
Yes, it's linked in the video description.
You find a ready-to-run MSDOS 8 ISO on multiboot.ru.
Given that MS-DOS 8 is incapable of Real Mode, you could make a disk image with a Windows 98 boot disk, or a Windows 98 DOS bootable USB, CD-ROM, or use a second computer. Then you could install Windows 98 and Windows Millenium together, and two BAT scripts that run/enable either 98 or Me, and rename themselves to prevent renaming WINDOWS and Program Files for each OS, they could be WinME.bat or Win98.bat. If you boot to DOS with a Windows 98 boot disk and heve Me and 98, you have the full and most modern 9x system, you can use Windows 98 to ru programs that detect Me and refuse to run and to have full DOS.
The alternation between good os and bad os by Microsoft give some more money because people stay on the older release and then they have to pay money to upgrade without downloading the next version
Anyone that says Me was the worst never used Vista.
Vista actually got more stable by the time SP1 had released, but ME was heavily panned and it never was fixed.
@@weegeenumberone2 Vista was a resource hog. Microsoft gave me a free license key for Ultimate and I still only used it about 3 months before downgrading to XP. Every other release of Microsoft's OS seems to suck. 8/8.1, Vista, ME. It's yet to be foreseen if 11 is as bad as the others.
Vista was good, the main problem with it was that is was being shipped with hardware that wasn’t powerful enough to run it properly
Cool Ich bin auch deutsch.
Ich nicht ;)
Bin aus der Schweiz 🇨🇭
Pro-tip: use a slower CPU for emulation in 86Box, because it's a low-level emulator and it's for fast emulated systems very demanding on the host CPU. You can run OS/2 without performance drops and with moderate speed inside 86Box. Same for Windows 95. In this case: slower is faster (in the context of emulation).
The Windows XP format util allows to create a boot floppy that identifies as Windows Me
I wrote an update and installation utility for MS-DOS. It is the same as for RHEL systems.
More here: th-cam.com/video/ao3ZQzFrAW8/w-d-xo.html
Cool
At least! MS-DOS 8.0! I looked into this before, but it was too complicated and not worth it for me.
24 years too late. and then again, I am also not getting younger. can you do comparison of free dos with Microsoft dos.
I'll have a look into at some point, for sure!
Reading the comments, I see you often say Ack. What does it mean? Acknowledge like the processor does or something else?
Ack 🙂
(acknowledge, like SYN / SYN-ACK / ACK in TCPs 3-way handshake)
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Ack.
Where can you download Hexit?
@MattTrevett Here you go: mklasson.com/hexit.php
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Many thanks!
@@MattTrevettYou're welcome!
One could ask AI to rewrite new Windows 98se/ME kernel with SMP and other modifications along with ME io.sys no-himem modification with real mode. Also with Nvidia/ATI-AMD opengl drivers for old systems . Even with WINE for DOS.😁
Windows Mistake Edition please! :D
Otherwise: still good videos! Greetings from Leipzig (GDR)!
Posted with my Robotron EC1834 through some self-made script.
@@msdosm4nfredOh my ... ein ex-DDR Rechner? Wir haben das ENTER Museum hier in der Schweiz, die haben zwei Robotrons in der Ausstellung, leider nur "on Display", und nicht in Betrieb.
Hab so ein Ding erst einmal Live in Betrieb gesehen. Bitte gut drauf aufpassen! ;-)
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Tja, ich gehöre zu den wenigen Leuten, die das Privileg hatten, anno '89 geboren zu sein und sich besonders mit der IT-Hostorie aus dem eigenen Land auseinanderzusetzen. Meine weitere Jagd geht nach Bulgarien, wegen den Prawez-Rechnern, die sollen besonders interessant sein im RGW-Raum.
Es sei noch erwähnt, dass mein Erzeuger damit geflext hat, unschuldige Leute an der Mauer einfach abgeknallt zu haben. Dafür schäm ich mich seit meiner Geburt anno 1989. An den Robotron kam ich anderweitig per Kontakt zur Sowjetunion, mein Modell ist ein Exportmodell, welches ich wieder reimpotiert hatte. Das Original hatte keine ISA-Slots gehabt, das Modell, was ich reimportiert hatte, hat echte ISA-Slots
Inzwischen stehts auch nimmer bei mir, ich hab das Ding an ein DDR-Computermuseum gespendet, wo der Gerät besser uffgehoben ist.
Great videos but could you use English copies so we can follow along??😊
I truly believe your channel would thrive if you change the sphincter sounding name. Cheers.
Hahaha ...
It's arguable wether it's too odd already to scare people away, or to make them remember.
The name has a long-lasting history behind, as explained in the channel description.
And that's why it is, what it is, the channel with the intentional odd spelling.
Having said that, your interpretation made me laugh. I'd wonder if there's more people coming to that same conclusion. It never occured to me.
Na. Keep it.
I thought you said 7.1 is fake? 🧐
The MS-DOS 7.1 distribution, which was assembled by a group of people referred to as the „China DOS Union“, is a fake product.
There was never an official release of MS-DOS 7.1 by Microsoft.
The DOS contained in that distribution of course is still the real thing, as these guys essentially extracted the MS-DOS 7 files from Windows 98 and bundled it to a standalone MS-DOS 7 distribution.
So fake in the meaning of „not an official Microsoft product / distro“.
It’s still the real MS-DOS 7.1 from Windows 98.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR Thanks for clarifying. I was under the impression that they renamed DOS 6.22 into DOS 7.1.
if you are able to boot win95 on os/2 it was a miracle.
Indeed!
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTORbut it was the thing on your latest not published video?
5:10 the video didnt appear for me
@tezcanaslan2877
Yeah, sometimes the video links via the YT info popups seem to not show properly.
This is the previous video I did th-cam.com/video/Iofa_2bnQiA/w-d-xo.html
You'll find it as well at the very end of the video description.
ME was a cash grab.
😂
2:49 Windows10 and Windows11 breaks the scheme. W10 is the unstable and W11 is the stable one.
It‘s anyway just a bit of an urban legend about he cycle IMO.
It depends heavily on how and which version you count.
For me, Win10 was running just fine without troubles for years, and now does Win11.
I avoided Win8 like pest, but mostly for the sh*** UI.
If you count 98SE and 8.1 then it works from 95. 11 is definitely better than 10, it's faster than 10 on my Celeron tablet and very stable too, never crashed once.
Windows 95 was a great release, Windows 98 was even better. The urban legend is not true.
not really, 11 is the OS equivalent of putting a fresh coat of paint on an old rusty car without first removing the rust
sure its got a brand new look, but for power users the fact that everything is held together with code ductape becomes apparent quite quickly. also 11 is just straight up missing many features 10 had like the option to change taskbar height
oh God Windows Me was bloody unstable far mroe unstable than windows 95!!!
It depended. When running Windows Me with then-current / new hardware, staying away from legacy hardware, and thus VXD drivers sometimes dating back to Win95, then it could be very stable.
Technically, Windows Me still could use the VXD drivers, and people using Windows Me as an upgrade to older boxes, that were already around with Windows 95 or Windows 98, really had a hard time.
Why do you keep patching the various files for there version check. Because ms-dos came with at TSR to do it for you, known as SETVER. With setversion you could spoof the check with any dos version number it wanted to hear. How about that Microsoft provided a workaround for their own problems.
I'm aware about SETVER, but that doesn't always cover all eventualities.
On a boot disk, which may or may not have a CONFIG.SYS yet, there's simply no guarantee SETVER is loaded.
And it's a total throwback, if you want FORMAT /S or SYS the C: drive and need to fiddle around with SETVER first.
Also, if you simply copy over files, without bothering for a CONFIG.SYS yet, it's just practical to not needing to care for SETVER, especially when a FORMAT.COM or SYS.COM was taken from a previous DOS version as in this example.
Also, as far as some of the demoed patches in this video are concerned, not all of them are concerning version checks, but other bypasses. So SETVER won't help there anyway.
Neither won't SETVER help for things Windows DLLs to be patched for version checks, as they wouldn't care at all what SETVER says.
I could give you even another example why patching is just a blunt necessity, although that's from IBM's PC DOS.
When merging PC DOS 7.1, which was never a full release, with the files of PC DOS 2000 (= PC DOS 7.0), to make it a complete release, you *must* patch SETVER yourself.
Because PC DOS 7.1 didn't have SETVER, and in order to make the PC DOS 7.0 SETVER working on 7.1, you must patch it.
Only then you could start using SETVER, to have it fake the DOS version for the other 7.0 utilities.
In the end, such patches are there to simplify things.
Windows ME = Windows for Dummies! Why does this matter today 21 years later?
It doesn‘t, except for people interested into retro tech :)
I think all modern versions of Windows are the worst versions of Windows ever. The last good Windows was XP and even that had the beginnings of MS anti consumer behavior. I have a retro XP machine I keep for playing older games for compatibility. It was starting to give me some trouble (it's over 20 years old) so I decided to strip it down, clean it, new thermal paste, lube the fans, replace some caps on the mobo. A quick overhaul. I changed NONE of the hardware but when I reassembled it I did put the expansion cards (sound, USB 2.0 upgrade card, Wifi) back in different PCI slots then they were originally in. Upon booting, XP told me that my hardware had changed and that I had to reactivate Windows. RIDICULOUS! NOTHING CHANGED! Just different slots! I looked at a photo and switched the cards back to where they originally were but at this point it was too late. I had to call MS with a 10 mile long code number and reactivate or I would have been locked out in 3 days!!!! What happens years from now when MS no longer offers this reactivation service? Behavior like this is why on modern systems I don't run Windows. Windows is a horrible bloated mess with a UI that is so screwed up it still uses a combination of MS new clunky modern UI yet still contains UI elements and dialogs that date all the way back to Win95 even today in Windows 11! And it's full of spyware always reporting home on your activity.
Six reasons why Windows ME was better than Windows XP:
1. It was built on the MS-DOS kernel, not the plagued Windows NT kernel which was incompatible with almost every piece of software written for a Windows 95-based PC.
2. It started up faster than Windows XP, again, because of the complexity of the plagued Windows NT kernel.
3. It had more features than Windows XP Home Editon. You can logon onto a domain unlike Windows XP Home Edition which completely yanks out that feature from an NT-based operating system.
4. It could be tweaked to run like Windows 98, mitigating the crashes and bugs Windows ME had, and it would STILL work better than Windows XP.
5. It was faster than Windows XP. Windows XP is a bloated version of Windows 2000, which was already slower than Windows 9x/ME because of the plagued Windows NT kernel.
6. It had better driver support. Windows XP was notorious for driver incompatibilty on a NEW COMPUTER and did not have support for any of the legacy drivers which were designed to run for Windows 9X/ME.
This was my experience when upgrading from Windows ME to Windows XP. Everyone continues to claim that Windows ME is a bad operating system but they forgot how bad Windows XP was when it was first released.
I used Win ME from around 2000-2005 and it was really not as bad as some people claim it was. I used it precisely for Win 9x/DOS compatibility and because Win XP was quite resource intensive when it first came out.
Dude, tell me you're a hater without telling me you're a hater 😄
For real though, you're exagerrating. For many people Win XP worked very good out of the box. Without buying a new computer for it. That's (also) why sooo many people remember it so fondly. Did you install pre-release versions, or what ?
For my case, I remember that in Win 98 the dialup modem was quite a chore to install the drivers for. I don't remember the details, but it was something like first installing manually (choosing from a huge list) some enumerator then doing something else, and only then adding the driver or something like that. It took multiple tries to make it work. When I upgraded to WinXP, the modem worked out of the box, I didn't had to install anything. I remember that WinXP did have higher requirements, but other than a very slow Morrowind (IIRC I had 128 MB of RAM and for WinXP they recommended 256) I don't remember being affected by it. Because of the modem part, when we upgraded to WinXP it gave us the confidence boost that it's a good OS and we never looked back, never felt the need to go back to '98 or Me. It was actually the smoothest upgrade of an OS we had back then, but I think that's more down to luck. Still, if it was SUCH a "plagued" one, luck wouldn't have matter much.
@@Winnetou17 I'll tell you I'm a hater without telling you I am a hater.
I had Windows XP as my main operating system for 10 years, from 2002 to 2012. In fact I still have computers running Windows XP Professional. So yes. This clarifies why I am a "hater".
Now for the history story. My family bought a brand new Dell Dimension 8100 in late 2001. It was running Windows Millennium. At the time, I didn't know anything about kernels. All I know is that Windows Millennium was the next version of Windows. I knew back then that Windows 2000 was around, but I never had a copy of it therefore I didn't bother to look into it. Anyways, all I know is that everything from my old computer migrated. Everything worked. DOS games worked, Windows games worked, CD Burning was new and was amazing to make my own audio cd, yes the system hung at times, but this was the case with my older computer running Windows 95 and 98.
Now, in 2002, upgrading to Windows XP Home Edition using a coupon which came with my brand new computer. We spent the 35 dollars, got the XP Home upgrade CD from Dell, then upgraded. Everything broke. Games wouldn't run properly, DOS games hung the entire machine, hardware kept hanging the entire system, it was an absolute nightmare. I got a second hand scanner (I don't remember the model number) but it connected to the parallel port, it hung the entire system, with Windows ME it never did this.
In 2003 I was told by Dell technical support that DOS games were not compatible with Windows XP. I didn't understand why. I only found out in 2005 about the DOS vs NT kernel, that Windows XP was built on NT, which is the main reason why nothing worked after the upgrade.
Your story on the Dial Up mode, I can relate this to a 3rd party modem being impossible to configure in Windows 98 back in the year 2000. At one point I was afraid to reinstall Windows with the risk of losing drivers for it. I never had this experience because the Dell 8100 had the Lucent Win Modem software which configured it automatically, so it worked flawlessly both in Windows ME and Windows XP (XP had preinstalled drivers for this). It sounds like you lucked out with driver support because the dell consumer based systems were absolutely terrible in this regard when upgrading to Windows XP.
Also in 2005, I deployed active directory in my environment. The reason is to have a user have their documents on each computer redirected to the server. I was disgusted how the Home Edition of Windows XP completely yanked the feature out. Windows 95 98 and ME had this feature where you could log into the domain and have My Documents redirected to the server. Microsoft sure knows how to make things completely inconvenient for consumers.
Fortunately in 2004, doing a clean install of Windows XP Professional SP1 without installing the Dell bloatware, and removing older hardware like that scanner, ditching DOS programs, made Windows XP usable. We ended up dual booting Windows ME and Windows XP. There was always some charm going back to ME while keeping XP for everything else.
@@judenihal You certainly got the short stick there. In my case, we didn't use any domain features (we only had a single computer, and that one was a SH one bought in '98, it originally was from '96, but we did upgrade most of the components by the time XP came). We also didn't paid anything for the Windows itself, in that time piracy in our country (Romania) was very common. I'm sure that even companies, small ones especially, had mostly pirated software. Though it was about then when it started to diminish.
Yeah, so on those fronts I certainly cannot disagree. But I don't remember having that much problem with DOS games. Probably I simply didn't played them much then, and probably got SP2 in the mean time. I don't remember. But I do remember playing Warcraft III a lot, once we got a GPU (I literally had the game installed and not running for months until we got a 3D video card, lol). Same with Quake 3, but that one I played much less, as it already kind of run its course in the prior years.
@@judenihal thank you for your comments, I don't understand all the hater-aide that gets poured on WinME, I honestly believe it comes from people who NEVER experienced it AT ALL. It was practically Win98"c" / Win98 Third edition! I got a lot of milage out of it, even used it as a server to share a DSL internet connection which was EASY to configure. People look at XP with rosey glasses and YES it was good but when people refer to "good" XP they FORGET they are refering to SP2 / SP3, not the first shipment.
Please use Windows and the programs in your videos in English, I am an Italian and I just can't appreciate them in German language 😅😅
I'm an italian as well ;-)
I do use EN software mostly, except sometimes when different language versions expose different behaviour, or in this case, where I decidedly wanted to test the patches and the patchset on the german version of Windows Me.
Most of the time I hope the added narration and highlight segments should cover up for the context, even if the captured footage is in a different language.
@@THEPHINTAGECOLLECTOR I thought you were german from the amount of german things you had
@@tezcanaslan2877Swiss Italian descendant, to be exact, but in the german speaking of Switzerland, so no way around german.
Similar topic: you might not be aware that “crippled” isn’t something people say anymore.