ฝัง
- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 3 มิ.ย. 2024
- Install Raid for Free ✅ IOS: clcr.me/mwmoRi ✅ ANDROID: clcr.me/Atl8kg ✅ PC: clcr.me/bq0M9b and get a special starter pack 💥 Available only for the next 30 days
Windows ME has often been called the worst version of Windows ever released (although Vista beat it in my recent Worst OSes video). I have a closer look at Windows ME and install it on an early 2000's eMachines PC, try out some programs and see how bad, or good, it really is!
Support the channel on Patreon: / danwooduk
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
My Facebook: / danwooduk
Sources used in this video (under fair use or with permission):
USA: MICROSOFT LAUNCH LATEST WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM: • USA: MICROSOFT LAUNCH ...
The Computer Chronicles - Digital Home Movies (1999): • The Computer Chronicle...
Windows ME Video - Bundled with Windows ME - วิทยาศาสตร์และเทคโนโลยี
Install Raid for Free ✅ IOS: clcr.me/mwmoRi ✅ ANDROID: clcr.me/Atl8kg ✅ PC: clcr.me/bq0M9b and get a special starter pack 💥 Available only for the next 30 days - Please support our sponsors and the channel :)
😡🤬😡🤬😡🤬
i had me and i had no problems with it but that was i supp-es i new how to work with it and the one thing i fond out with all windows what ever the box sed on memory double it
Yeah, definitely not installing that garbage. You gotta do what you've gotta do though.
I don't blame you for accepting it you're just a small youtuber who need money but fuck raid shadow legends i'm tired of seeing their shitty game everywhere
I used ME for a good 5 years until I jumped ship and started using XP. Pretty quickly I jumped out off that boat and used Vista for so long I can't remember. I used it for so long I skipped clean over Windows 7 and jumped onboard Windows 8. Then 8.1 and then 10.. .
You were lucky - in 2000 I spent two whole days trying to get that abortion to install before giving up completely.
Yep same, my girlfriend during that time in 03 had an HP that came preinstalled with ME, and was always having trouble it. after the 4th time doing a fresh install, I just went back to Windows 98 SE, and called it a day till I upgraded her to a newer machine I built myself with Windows XP on it.
Same here. Back in 2000 I've Installed it a couple of times in 2 days, and ended up restoring "ghosted" win98se back. I guess it depended on hardware. At that time I've had Celeron @400-500MHz and 64MB of RAM. The machine in this video is way more powerful than that, and I had about whart was a mid-range for that time... So maybe it just worked better on newer and better hardware.
@@robertosswald5896 Yes that was about mid range for sure, and it was not only the higher hardware needed to run ME proper, but the lack of ME drivers for the hardware, and people want to say well that was not MS fault, but in a way it was because MS was still using the 9X kernel, and failed to make ME fully compatible with 98/SE drivers of which most hardware up to that point had drivers for. MS was just a cluster F all around for so many.
@@CommodoreFan64 Exactly. Could be that Dan had luck with the fact that he had all the right drivers and powerful hardware so that's why it worked for him (the advantages of hindsight :) ).
I just pirated Windows 2000
I worked at MSFT when Me came out. It was definitely called "me", but that was just marketing. I don't know anyone inside the company who called it anything other than Millennium. We didn't talk about much at all to be honest, though. We generally ran NT 4 and then Win2k rather than any of the 9xs.
duh, can you imagine the chaos if every employee had to face the blue screen of death a few times a day? I know yall popped in and ran 9x when Age of Empires came out...
NT4 was rock stable if you found hardware with NT drivers. Windows 2000 was the stability of NT, with the GUI of 9x, and the terribly slow boot times of ME...and almost no manufacturers had released drivers for it when it came out and few ever did after, and I totally blame MS for that--so 2000 was great if you work for a company that orders 10,000 computers at a time and can dictate driver development--then MS cut off 2000 like a bad sore the day XP came out (in my opinion to force online activation nightmares...the medieval MS era from 2001 to 2015, when I spent my non-gaming time in Slackware)
@@Doing_Time Hard to tell your tone/intent from your text, but you are right about a few things: 9x stability was part of the issue, but in our case it had far more to do with our machines having to be in a domain rather than stability. While you can join 9x boxes to domains, they lacked some of the central management features that ITG (the IT department-- the "most feared and loathed group") want to employ. NT4 was my favorite OS ever until Windows 7 came out. (Win7 still holds that title). NT4 was very stable, but lacked plug-and-play support out of the box (though you could hack it in), not to mention USB. Both of these things became very important very quickly in the time between the NT4 and W2K releases. W2K boot time was *really* *really* bad, but Me boot times IME were pretty good. MSFT did drop both Me and 2k when XP was released, but if you think about it, consumer-friendly act in itself or not, no longer bifurcating the consumer and business markets with different products was the right answer. The mistake was really in releasing Me and 2K at all, not in placing focus on XP. Also, for what it's worth, very few rank-and-file people in the company (which decidedly included me) saw online activation in any more favorable light than consumers in general. I remember raging against it at work, as unpolitic as that definitely was. (I was young, and never very good at politics.) The "medieval era" as you put it, was really the Steve Ballmer era. Let's put the blame for that time where it belongs. Everything the company did was about fulfilling Steve's edict of protecting the Office and Windows kingdoms, and several of my projects were sh--canned as a result. It's notable that the stock price was flat for his entire tenure as well. Gates was a thousand times the visionary Ballmer ever was, and Nadella a thousand times the business man. (Sorry Steve!)
And Jobs was a million times the visionary Gates was, and Woz a billion times the engineer of all four of these other names-- combined! :D
@@msthalamus2172 I agree with almost all of that...NT4 was there for me as long as all I wanted to do was code or type documents...multimedia in general and directx specifically was pathetic. 2000 was my favorite of all time (until windows 8/.1/10), but I grew to resent how MS made a mockery of those of us who bought 5 copies of 2000 pro the day it came out and then left us in the dust. XP fixed the boot times, but other than being better/longer supported I thought it was just a lot of eye candy additions. Vista introduced slow computing the likes of which hadn't been seen since floppy booting. They did fix the uac and validation issues a little bit by the last service pack, they refer to it as Windows 7. I can't say enough glowing things about directx, multimedia playback, virtualization, and driver support in windows 10...and I've only seen blue screens when hardware actually failed. I've changed out motherboards, GPUs, memory, etc. without any need to validate windows messages (in the medieval era, I actually had to re-validate for things like a USB wifi adapters and once a game pad...and online validation didn't always work so I'm on the phone to MS at 3am in the morning talking to someone about why I should be validated (eventually they got smart and automated the phone validation))
@@msthalamus2172 oops, didn't see your second comment until now. Well, the apple guys certainly liked to party... More of an Amiga man myself--how could stupid commodore screw that up? Ahh well, I prefer blackberries too... often the best products fail because it's all about image=Apple. I programmed an Apple IIe for a week and have never again been tempted to touch another Apple product...no backspace!?!?! I have to retype the entire line of code to get back to the typo!?!?! Ahhhhhh
I remember buying a windows me PC from Tesco, it came with my first LCD screen too. Didn't have that many issues with mine compare to the day I got a vista laptop!
Tbh, most of the issues were down to bad/inappropriate drivers being used. Often, companies would repackage windows 98 drivers for ME and say "f**k it, that'll do". The problem with that was how the windows driver model had changed between 98 and ME. It was close enough that old drivers could work (in theory), but they were different enough that it would cause a lot of crashes and incompatibility.
In your case, you probably had the right drivers!
The win 9.x line wasn't really based on DOS. It actually had it's own 32 bit kernel. It used DOS as a bootloader and then DOS handed over control to the 9.x kernal. DOS was kept running on the side for backwards compatbility. Which in some ways makes it a hybrid OS, but it's not like the first three versions of windows.
>Quote "That image of ME being the worst version only came along in recent years".
For me it actually was the worst version.
We have satirical memes like "your mouse cursor has moved. You must restart for changes to take effect" because of it.
I agree. We were all laughing at Windows ME back in 2000, too
@@10MARC Yep, it was considered absolutely buttock-clenchingly piss poor when it was new. I tested it out a few weeks after it was released, and I reinstalled 98SE very soon afterwards. :)
Didn't remember those jokes - it does describe my (limited) experience with it though =)
I've always suspected ME's reputation for being unstable being down to drivers. Drivers were something that came on a floppy or CD when you bought something. You had to be an enthusiast back then to even consider updating a driver from the net.
That would explain why people who checks it out nowadays don't see the same issues. They'll usually get the latest compatible drivers,
I've always thought the same. On both real hardware and VMs, I've had way more luck with Windows Me being stable than I've ever had with Windows 98 (either edition). Definitely my preferred way to run Win9x things.
My parents bought it for me when I was child in 2000. Still was better than 98 at least when it came to play games
My experience was ME was positive initially. I'd heard mixed things about it back in the day, but I had the upgrade itch. I was running some older hardware that only had driver support for 98 and ME so that ruled out 2000 for me. I grabbed myself a copy and installed it from scratch onto my pc. I was really impressed, it felt like 98 but more modern (I suppose that's exactly what it was) I spent the next week slowly painfully copying my files from CD backups over to the machine. I kid you not, a day after I'd finally got ME exactly how I wanted it with all my files restored, one day I went to start my pc and it wouldn't boot. Would just bluescreen. I did nothing unusual the day before, shut it down as I would any other time but it never booted again. No idea why. Went back to 98 and stayed with 98 until xp came out and upgraded from 98 to xp. Never looked back. So although I want to stick up for ME, because while it worked, it was great, I can't because it decided to seemingly implode for no reason I'm aware of.
I have never really used Me as I jumped from a 98 PC straight to XP (which actually started in school for me) but I bought the installation discs from an earlier colleague of mine years ago so that I would have it in my collection.
Back then mom got me a computer book with lots of pictures of PCs, operating systems and other stuff in it, looking at Me always made me think how cool it looks.
I actually had no problems with Windows Me. I installed it on my parents' home computers, because it had System Restore and System File Protection, so that when things got messed up, I could help them get back to a working state quickly.
same!
I remember that in about 2006, I tried to make a networked file server using an old PC and Windows ME. I think it lasted about 3 weeks before it refused to boot - and then I installed Linux and it ran for 3 years!
I worked in the tech department of a PC World during ME - ughhh dark days :)
When Windows ME came out, I purchased a new Dell notebook which came with ME. I plugged it into my home network, which by that time had about 8 or 9 computers on it. The notebook which was a fairly high end machine for the time, was so slow it took almost 2 minutes to open a one page MS Word document. After fighting with it for several days I discovered the issue. ME was trying to index everything on my network, which would have been somewhere around 500 gigabytes at that time. Once I figured how to turn off indexing, which was on by default, the problem went away. Shortly thereafter, I deleted ME and bought a copy of 98 for that machine.
I remember my grandma had an HP computer that came with Windows Me on it that I would use whenever I went to her house. I don't really remember it being as problematic as everyone says.
Years later she bought another HP and that one had Vista on it. It was in the really early days of Vista, and it was 64-bit at that. THAT computer was a nightmare.
She probably made the mistake of buying one of those NetBust Celerons which were terrible and didn''t even run XP properly. I ran vista on a Core 2 Duo for 5 years and it was fine. Core 2 is the same basic architecture still used in intel CPUs today so Core 2 Duos and Quads still work pretty well for a basic Windows 10 PC even in 2022. Just don't expect to do much current gaming with them, though a Quad will run fortnite ok with a discrete GPU. Vista and 7 were/are great because you can run most XP era games and even a lot of Win95/98 games on them and you can't on any later version of Windows. I still have a PC running 7 for that purpose. I even ran Windows 10 on a late P4 with hyperthreading not too long ago from a SSD and it was pretty useable as long as you didn't open 6 apps and 23 browser tabs at once. But the Celerons based on them had a completely emasculated cache and would run at 100% just with light use even on XP. Basically just constantly shuffling data back and forth between cache, memory and storage because they usually had way too little of all of those.
Windows Me was more the Windows 'meh' uninspiring Stuff in it. But working for the Housewife and stable. I was fixing a lot of SE Machines where the User was the Problem, not Me.
Vista had the Problem of the OEM. 512MB minimum Ram 800 Mhz CPU Clock. In a time when the Athlon XP 2000+ /Celeron 2000 with 1Gig or 2 Gig was the normal PC.
The OEM had forced it on Microsoft for the Netbook, and 512MB on an XP Machine was already in its way out.
My experience was on release on a decent PC (Said Athlon XP 2000+ and 1.5gig Ram): A little slower thanks to the bug with the small files.
Vista SP1 when i sold my then Gaming PC 2007 (Athlon XP 3200+ with 3Gig of Ram and ATI X1650XT so a upper End 2006 Gaming PC): Vista SP1 was about 30% faster than Windows XP with Barton Core Mods etc.
On my C2D Vista SP1 x64 was literally running Circles around XP. Had Dual boot for about 1 Month then i threw XP away.
(it helped that i had a special Asus Vista Ready Motherboard with fast Ready Boost Flash installed, it reduced the small files Problem and cutt down the Boottime to 12 Seks WITH a HDD)
So for Vista:
Oem minimum PC worse, as Vista used twice as much Memory and CPU Time as XP.
Decent 2000 Class PC with 1-2 Gig Ram here was the point of equilibrium. Especially after SP1
A faster PC with 3Gigs of Ram and a 3000 class or better Prozessor with modern Grafikscard: 30% faster in 32bit Mode.
A 64 Bit Dualcore with 4 Gig of Ram about twice as fast.
But Intel was still selling the Celeron D 2ghz especially the Celeron 310 without Intel 64 till 2007 with the lackluster 910-945 Chipsets. They had so many produced that they had to pair the Atom with them, to get them sold. And Calling a Celeron 310 on a 910 Chipset a 2000 Class Prozessor would be... a exaggeration. Of course those Systems only got 512MB of Ram and Vista.
Wish we could go back to the 3D look of previous Windows versions. Windows 10 is soulless.
Windows ME remains the only OS I've ever downgraded from. I'm sure it ran perfectly fine for a lot of people but on my system it didn't.
I did install ME back in the day on my 1999 PC - Celeron 333, Nvidia TNT, 64MB ram to see what it was all about and I never found any issues. My only problem was I was still playing DOS games like Blood, DUKE3D and even DOOM so there it was not so great. I still have that PC but now upgraded to P3 350 and 128MB of Ram and USB 2.0 card running 98SE. I think Dan after watching I might clean install ME for Windows use. I have got Windows on an SD to IDE set up as well as a mechanical HDD. I might copy DOS 7 to the HDD and use a floppy to boot to DOS for real mode for my DOS games. Can't 100% remember but if I boot to DOS from floppy it can't see the SD/IDE disk anyway. Great video as always.
Nice video Dan. I remember using "Me" quite a bit. Worked well for the most part. Really only crashed on me while gaming. Back then we actually transported our entire PC, Monitor, and peripherals to friends houses for "Game Nights" and the infamous LAN parties. After dealing with the pretty frequent game crashes, I switched over to "2000." Liked it better and never looked back. Well I guess that isn't entirely true. I did make a "DOS Box" and installed 95 (w/ MS-Dos), 98, Me, and 2000 using System Commander. As like you, nostalgic reasons. I think I'm going to fire that up now after seeing your video. :)
My mate had Windows ME for sometime around 2005 or so. I remember indeed having to help him finding suitable drivers that wouldn't crash his system all the time. I think he reinstalled ME at least 2 or 3 times while he had it. I believe it also was missing some things I could do on XP at that time that weren't available for ME. I can't remember what those things were, I think it might have been regarding to some networking stuff.
A few months before Windows XP came out, I bought a new Toshiba laptop with Windows ME. When it was running, it was just fine, but it crashed at least once a day. Shortly after this, XP came out and I had it dual-booting XP and Red Hat Linux, both were very stable and I used that laptop for years.
nice
Honestly, I like Windows ME, always have. Part of it might be at least in part, mostly the nostalgia factor since Windows ME was the very first Windows I ever used when my dad bought our very first PC back in 2000 (a Metron PC, powered by a 566MHz Celeron and 32 MB of SDRAM and a 6.5GB hard drive. I still have that machine and it still works), but truth is... We never had issues with ME for as long as we had it on our PC. We'd browse the web, make documents on Word, I'd play my games, etc. It always worked fine and quick. Maybe we were some of the "lucky ones" or just coincidence, but maybe there might be something to that theory that upgrading from 98 could have something to do with it, as ours was a native install. Regardless, despite all the hate it gets and recognizing that it does have flaws, Windows ME still has a place in my heart.
“My very good friends at...” makes me cringe. Unless you can post a photo of you sharing a social experience with the staff at xyz sponsor then please leave that line out.
Thanks for saying what I thought. It's absolute ok, if you get money from your sponsors. But just be honest about it. This whole "friends" thing with youtube sponsors is awful. He's certainly not the only Yotuber, who does it like that. I was about to stop the video and unsubscribe. Maybe i will next time.
I see nothing wrong with it.
Excellent video as always Dan! What model of Pentium 4 is in your Windows 98 PC? I love Windows 98 and use Pentium II PCs are pretty expensive here in the USA.
I used ME for awhile before XP and never had any real issues that I can remember... maybe ATI driver issues?
It had some issues with certain drivers, but the OS itself wasn't that bad and many users would have a nice experience
The problem was ME came on a lot of very low end prebuilt machines, and they often did not bother to make ME specific device drivers for them, thus forcing Win 98/SE drivers to run under ME, which tended to cause all kind of problems, then the fact many of them did not come with enough ram to run ME proper. eMachines was one of the worst companies about doing this back in the day.
The issue here is that the hardware makers should be making the drivers. No OS should expect to need to do that.
Most instabilities were driver related. That is not the fault of the OS.
@@0311Mushroom That is true, but in the case of ME, when the hardware you had did not have proper drivers, and it kept having issues it did make the OS unusable, so many times when I had to fix computers for others, and I knew there was Win 98SE drivers I just went back the 98SE, and called it day well at least before XP came out, and got out of it's early days.
@@CommodoreFan64 once again, the fault with the hardware makers, not the OS itself.
over a hundred installs of ME and had numerous crashes on the installer when detecting plug and pray devices
Plug and pray 🤣
Great video, thanks. Like any sticker lavished skateboard, at the back of the PC you'll find some wheels too 😉
Enjoyed your video of windows Me iv got an old desktop and look forward to trying Me for myself and I am glad you mentioned the Retrozilla browser iv been looking for a browser to work with old operating systems for quite a while and this will be really useful thanks
OH BOI, The rollecoaster that was ME! My personal Choice was 2000 Pro, until windows 7 came out. I did have a laptop with XP aswell :D
I don't think I ever used ME. I do remember using 98 on an old desktop though. I think my mom mentioned trying 2000 and not liking it though. I do remember XP though. I never owned a Vista machine myself but I did get a Windows 7 laptop as a birthday present in 2010. Sadly I nuked the hard drive on it in 2014, coincidentally around the time my mom gave me a Windows 8 laptop she had gotten the year before (she got a tablet and we have a couple spare MacBooks). I still have that old Windows 8 machine (though I later put Windows 10 and/or Linux on it) but I am getting a new laptop since she assumed I had already gotten one by now.
98 to XP to Win7 Beta. I was soo desperate to get rid of stock Windows Vista on my new powerful Laptop with Geforce Go7700 512mb. I resorted to daily driving Beta Windows 7 and it was still faster and more stable than Vista.
@@Neojhun Thankfully I got to skip over Vista.
@@EpicB It was stock on the Asus A8JS 512mb VRAM version. A beast of a laptop yet it still got bogged down and strained under the buggyness of Vista. Win7 Release To Manufacturer was the first time it realy flew and showed me what it was capable of. Even Beta was a little buggy.
@@Neojhun Windows 7 was definitely one of the best Windows releases. I used Vista on at least one other person's computer but otherwise I never really got to experience it first hand.
Yep I bought that new back in the day, no system builder OEM, full price. I don't remember it being crap but I did go buy XP at full retail price shortly after
When ME came out, I was working in the IT department of a small college. Typically, we built the computers for all of the offices and installed the OS and software on all of them. We were given a preview copy of ME a few months before it was actually released and installed in on a computer in our office area to test it out. It would crash on us daily so we recommended against it and either installed 98SE or 2K on computers we built depending on the needs of the user.
One department wanted ME and didn't like the fact that we wouldn't install it so they bought "off-the-shelf" computers that came pre-installed with ME (paying at least 25% more than IT would have charged for similar computers). After 2 weeks, they asked us to buy licenses for 98SE and install it for them since their computers were crashing constantly. Again, these were computers that came from the manufacturer with ME pre-installed, so it wasn't some issue with them not supporting ME.
My only real experience w/ WinMe was my mom getting a Compaq Presario that I think was Celeron-based that came with Win98SE, but included a free WinMe "upgrade." When she got the upgrade CD in the mail, she went ahead and installed it and started having problems with her PC. My older brother and I were only willing to troubleshoot it briefly before just replacing her PC w/ a used custom built Pentium II mid-tower w/ Win2K instead. Otherwise, I put WinMe on a VM several years ago (as I have most older OSes on VMs), but never messed with it much.
I skipped Windows ME back in the day and went from 95 to XP. I've actually only used Windows ME in a virtual machine. Never had any issues with it, but not really disappointed that I passed this version by and went to XP. Windows XP is my 2nd favorite operating system after Windows 7.
I only only had issues with older systems that were upgraded from 98. A fresh install worked fine, even on older hardware.
I had installed windows me in my PII back in the day and it was the only OS that I didn't had any blue screens come up back in the day .I remember it was very stable
I suggest a follow up video in a couple of years of full use of the machine. I also can't understand the hate of Windows 95, but then I started with OSR2.
My Windows timeline was: 3.11 WFW > 95 (OSR2) > 2000 Pro > XP Pro > [Dual boot] 7 Pro (Main)/10 (Used only for occulus)
Dan, excellent video. I bought a cheap ME disc on Ebay and have used it in the VirtualBox. I agree with your conclusions. The problem is that Windows 98SE was pretty good, and like you state XP, that would have no problem running on this machine, came out only a year later. The only thing on this video I disagree with is the start sound of Windows 98SE "Fresh" sound is the best ever...
LOL!
Nostalgia avenue. Thank you for the video! Instant subb'd
4:50 PC World and Dixons in the early 2000s.
Not surprising seeing as Dixons [Stores Group] bought Vision Technologies in 1993 to get its hands on PC World that Vision Technologies set up...
Awesome vid bud :) and good on you! Don't copy that floppy ;)
I did tech support back in the day. People had a lot of issues with ME, mostly driver related blue screening. Might have been ok if it came preinstalled on a PC and you left it stock, but adding older hardware or upgrading a 98 install on an older computer caused a lot of issues.
For my Duron 700MHz on K7S5A Windows ME was a miracle. 98, 98SE was unstable, but ME was (really, as a linux user right now, I can't believe, that I'm writing it :P) rock solid.
I had a few issues with ME which ended driving me into putting 2k on my laptop.
One major was no matter what you did you couldn't get breezecom wireless drivers to work on it. It just would not accept the 98 drivers. There were a few other niggles I had with it and in the end installed 2000 professional. The 98 drivers worked and even though the system took longer to boot, I just preffered 2k.
First time I've ever heard the Windows NT boot tune!! We had many servers or PCs running it but nothing with a sound card or speakers plugged in. My home pc was Windows 98 so I completely missed it.
I used to have a Norton Ghost image of a clean ME install because I had to wipe my machine every two months. The things we put up with :)
I used & supported Windows ME back when it came out. Here are the issues I've run into I'll start with the biggest and it's not the DOS real mode (however that was really annoying). Biggest issue was the network stack. It had a modified version of w2k on a Win98 base. This caused many issues on a LAN. For instance every other user not using Me had to install a floppy disk program from the Windows ME system to talk with it. 2. It's network stack would corrupt databases *worked for Software company Tech support at the time and dealt with this often only had issues on Networked ME systems. Also I always did fresh installs ever since first version of Windows 98 found out upgrades were horrible. Also ran into other issues mentioned stability & driver issues. Just sharing my experience.
Back in the day the PCs in my job first ran DOS, then Windows 95 and then, when I joined the company, Windows 98. My boss did all computer maintenance himself and was happy to get some help from someone who also knew computers.
In these days my colleagues regularely killed their PCs. Windows 98 had far more possibilities to mess around with than a standard user should have had.
So that led to regular reinstalls... completely with all the good stuff as installing the hardware and get the PC connected to our Novell-server. A pain in the xxx. :-)
When Windwos Me arrived, the numbers of reinstalls massively dropped - thanks to the System Restore-function. And that was working properly. As I remember, one out of ten "problem PCs" needed a clean install after a crash, whereas the other one got back to work after the system restore.
I know, many people made different experiences with Me. For me, it was the best OS back in that day. I am still using it from time to time.
Nice memories... :-)
Oh I cringed when you said that office 97 was still the current version of office... when it was actually Office 2000 (released at the same time as Windows ME)
Office 2000 was relased in 1999 (pretty much alongside Windows 98 SE)
With all due respect to Office 4.0 which had the best version of Word ever made, Office 97 was the best version of MS Office ever made....it was less feature rich but more stable than word perfect suite and better integrated and documented than star office. By 2000 a variety of office suites began to surpass MS Office in utility and appearance and corel found some stability before disappearing shortly not long after staroffice opensourced, leading to the open source office revolution and eventually to the superior open document formats and ushering in support for a variety of database management systems, and google started fidgeting around with free online office features while MS started coming up with weird subscription and online activation ideas before it finally sank into the ribbons abyss that only government employees and contractors now find themselves buried in...
Give the pc more than a GB of RAM ( for example 3x512 Mb sticks) and watch Windows ME constantly bug out when it falls into memory holes when using more than the one gig mark.
or run it on a lowend base emachines with a Celeron with 1mb of video ram for the onboard GPU, and a low 64 - 128MB of system RAM, and it was just as bad at causing all kind of system instability.
I never used ME on my own system but my sister used it. I don't remember it being any worse than 98.
I was stuck with it for a time. As a daily driver OS, after 4 to 5 months it would start to become unstable, BSOD and then a new install.
I was around and playing games when this randomness was a thing. I had a Sound Blaster Audigy and a GeForce 256 card. Both of those companies made Windows 2000 drivers, and the latest Direct X was available for Windows 2000 then too. This meant that if you were running Windows 2000, you'd get NT reliability without any of the 9X unreliability and crashes. As a bonus, Windows 2000 had support for multiple processors. I had an ABIT VP6 with two 1Ghz Pentium III processors, which Windows 2000 could handle, but 9X/Me could not. There was absolutely no reason to run Me over 2000 for enthusiasts and gamers back then. Windows 2000 was an awesome OS, and is still one of my favorites.
I did an Me install for a pc I donated to a church - it was nothing but problems from the get-go.. . Crashes abounded and drivers were missing…
I remember my very first gaming PC that I built myself in early 2001. It had a 1.0 ghz Pentium III CPU with 256 mb pc133 ram and a 32 mb Nvidia GeForce 2 graphics card and I originally put Windows ME on it, but then later in 2002, I upgraded it to Windows XP. I didn't have much problems with Windows ME, but XP still felt like it ran more smoothly.
I have Windows Millennium on a Pentium IV and I can tell you:
1. All ms-dos games that are not speed sensitive to CPU run perfectly. The best video cards for Ms-dos compatibility are the Fx series from GeForce, for sound you need an Aureal Vortex 2, Sound Blaster Live, Audigy 1 or to have a pentium IV motherboard with an ISA slot.
2. Windows Me does not blue screen when you remove the CD, usb stick or floppy while it is being read.
3. It has wireless keyboard and mouse support.
4. The location of a driver is saved.
5. The usb stick does not need a driver.
6. I do not recommend the VDM drivers because there is no longer support for sound in ms-dos, but with VDM you can use advanced stand by functions (suspend to ram).
7. Any usb joystick does not need driver. For Ms-Dos you need a joystick connected to the game port.
8. Windows Me is the most stable, I tested it after installing many programs and games without restarting and it didn't crash.
9. If I had to choose another retro operating system, it would be Windows 95 and in no case Windows 98.
also! gee thanks now I'm gonna be binge watching your videos for quite a many hours! goodbye my daynight!
these rule, thanks man.
i knew I was in love with your content the second you mentioned GNU Hurd in your top 10 worst operating systems. i clapped! "bravo"
I remember when I was 8 years old and was using windows me back then,never had any problems with it....Same goes with vista and windows 7 or windows 8 and 8.1.The most problems I had was on windows xp and windows 10 I would say.
You're lucky if you weren't old enough to be using Vista as a corporate operating system at work. It's hands down the worst Windows ever released. I think many people spend at least the same time phoning the company's IT support than doing work. Even brand new machines just out of the box crashed in simple tasks like waking up from a screen saver.
@@blue_jm Vista RTM is really bad. SP1 was okay - my cousin has a descent HP PC running Vista and he never had a major issue.
SP2 is as solid and stable as 7 RTM, but that was too late unfortunately.
Similar as Me, most of the crashing issue is caused by outdated drivers, especially GPU.
XP on me hanged a lot because i had 256MB of RAM back in the day. It worked fine when i upgraded to 1.5GB.
i still use windows 8.1 lol its better than 10 imo
@@youtubesucks1111 8.1 is good, but i hated Windows 8.
I installed it over Win 98 SE back in the day. Hated it. It crashed several times per day when playing commercial games. I reverted back to WIn 98 SE and had no more problems.
I did the same but I was stupid and carried on using the OS believing I could fix my way through issues and it would get better. It didn't get better. The most miserable computing time ever was had using that OS. Win2k was like a religious revelation coming back to a stable machine that could run for weeks without a reboot. It was glorious haha
I don't remember ever seeing a front facing game port on a PC back then. Something specific to eMachines?
ran my studio in 2000-2002 on it on a custom built PIII 1Ghz, 1Gb ram, Matrox Millenium G400 with Yamaha DS2416 soundcard and AW44 expansion running Logic 5.5. was one of the most stable and responsive systems i ever used. switch to the mac in late 2002 when apple bought Emagic and it took many years to get a replacement as solid.
As someone who skipped Me back then, I tried it for the first time on a virtual machine and it wasn't as bad as some suggested. Besides the lack of a DOS mode, it seems that it was the *drivers* that caused most (if not all) of the problems that made Me a pain to use, not Me itself. If I could restore DOS mode _and_ have proper/Me-compatible drivers, I may consider using it on the retro PC I plan on building in the future.
If not, I still have 98 SE and those patches that port Me features to 98 SE haha.
I have used Windows Me back in the days and was rock-solid for me. It even sound better due to drivers on my Yamaha OPL3-SAX sound card with better bass and treble than on Windows 2000 which had the sound muffled and kinda metal-ish treble. I remember that I had a TV tuner which had crisp and better display of TV channels than on Windows 2000 which displayed the cannels more blurry.
I had windows ME on my Pentium 3 Media PC and never had any problems with it ( which I can't say about Windows 10 ).
Yeah, Windows 10 hates Pentium 3s...
D T ich hab das Windows 10 natürlich nicht auf meinem Pensum drei sondern auf meinem Dell Laptop
@@MiamiMillionaire ja, ich verstehe dich, aber windows 10 runs sehr gut auf meine 10 year old intel atom 1.8ghz, 10 year old amd e-350 1.6ghz, und 9 year old dell i7 laptops...as well as auf meine newer i5 desktop und i3 laptop...fast, secure, and never crashes.
Windows Me war bloated und ran much more slowly als Windows 98SE, und war und sitting ente fur spyware/malware und blau screened regularly
D T also auf meinem Laptop läuft Windows 10 so schlecht das ich zu Windows 7 zurückkehren werde. Bei mir stürzen ständig Programme wie Microsoft Word Ab, hatte es eh nur installiert Da DELL die passenden Hardware Treiber für Windows 7 nicht mehr auf ihrer Webseite hatte (was nicht wirklich von gutem Service spricht).
@@MiamiMillionaire Ja, Dell only has windows 7 drivers fur meine laptop--lol. It does sound like eine bad driver oder bad hardware. Fortunately, Windows 10 has built in drivers fur alle meine hardware except video...I download that at amd.com/support. On one of my netbooks I have to download usb 3 driver from downloadcenter.intel.com, und on another I have to disable driver enforcement und install the windows 7 nvidia video driver.
halfway between 98 and xp my English teacher used it for an entire year and it worked just fine.
I had ME when it came out and yes I did the upgrade install, and it was not good but after a couple of weeks fighting it I cracked and did a total fresh install and had no major trouble I can remember right up until XP arrived.
Then again I also didn't miss DOS and never have.
Yeah, upgraded from 98 to ME and back to 98 the next day. And it was because of random crashes. The driver support was terrible at launch...
I haven't even tried the Movie Maker on Windows ME since it was constantly crashing when trying to load video files.
Windows ME should of just been a service pack for Windows 98SE
No it added tons of new features
@@stanleybowman-hood6194 SP's have added features before, like 98 SE and XP SP2
Really dan, raid shadow shilling
Man's gotta eat
I did use it briefly in late 2000, I don't recall any major issues with it. I think the problem is many of the new features were made available as free updates to windows 98 anyway whilst most of the exclusive features were not deal breakers at the time (which home users cared about a better networking stack or USB mass storage support in 2000?). It wasn't so much that it was bad it was just there was no compelling reason to use it over 98SE especially when XP was on the way only a year later. Maybe it was a worthwhile purchase for windows 95 users wanting to get a bit of an upgrade and a bit more life out of hardware that wouldn't be able to run XP, but that's about it
I installed Windows ME the day it was released. Stayed on my computer for almost a week.
The main problem that appeared with ME was when it was an upgrade path from Win98SE which was a really stable OS (for the time). ME created so many driver conflicts and legacy software issues. As a standalone, fresh install, it was fairly ok. What also heaped on a number of issues was Freeserve - the release of THAT Freeserve CD caused so many issues. I had to reinstall so many OSes at the time.
Just one word on the PC - seeing a celeron of that age sends shudders up my spine.
I really like your retro content - I'm still a big Amiga fan though I no longer own any Amiga hardware or software. Back in the day, here in the US, when Windows ME, Millenial Edition, came out, we always called it M-E, not me, but Microsoft marketing did start selling it that way shortly after its initial launch. It just makes me cringe whenever someone says, "Me" instead of M.E. And it is still a pretty bad operating system that did get better after much upgrading from Windows 2000/NT and went on to become an even better and more stable system i.e. Windows XT and Windows 7.
I think the problem with windows ME was kinda the same Vista: the average machines of the era Weren't not ready for it.
Also having XP out so close to it just simply killed ot
Windows 98 probably feels a bit more sluggish compared to ME simply because the Start menu pop-out animations were set to have a slight delay. I remember back in the day they could be made to pop-out instantly by doing a registry tweak.
I never had much issue using ME, but I only used it on machines it came preinstalled on. Although about a year ago I tried it out on a Latitude D600 with a Pentium M and a Radeon 9000, I ended up putting Windows XP back on it because the Radeon 9000 drivers for 9x were pretty cruddy.
In some workplaces NT did not have sound and there weren't any speakers available.
I ran Windows Me for years and had no problems. I think a lot of people who had issues, those were either dirty upgrades or forcing 9x drivers on Me.
I had ME and it seemed o.k to me, excuse the pun.
I don't think it's as bad as some say, haven't had any issues with it & if i have, were only rather minor. Was also the first OS i owned on my first PC back in 2002, don't remember all the specifications of it as i didn't look at that kind of thing back then. Had 64MB Ram a 2GB hard drive, standard beige box & the like you would've got then, still have the "Original" install CD that came with it, but the data rot has certainly gotten to it, though i keep it because it's one of the only things i have left of it. Is a copied disc, with the rbdc9 serial on it, that product key is everywhere on older windows OS'es. And the PC ran fine back then for me too. Haven't used any DOS type programs on ME, i have 95/98 machines for that if need be. Also have it on a Dell Latitude D600 & works good on there too, though it doesn't detect the DVD drive for whatever reason, so i use an external one when need be. Sure, can see why it wasn't much chop, everyone's experience with it was different would say, and in my case, has been fine. Back then on my first PC, and nowdays on the machines it is installed on.
Once you got a slipstream app and ripped everything out of it that was not needed for it to boot it was not so bad .
Used Windows ME for years. I was hesitant to move to XP, and then I beta tested 7. Clean install is the key 🔑 to stability along with the latest drivers.
I recall that it was really popular to upgrade you machine back then from a previous version of windows witch was the reason why me was such disaster
the old E Machines brand I remember that brand as a kid I had two desktop computers from that brand I miss seeing that brand as it is long discontinued but I did see a CRT monitor with the E machines branding in 2011 I have heard of napster
Emachines was my second favorite brand next to gateway emachines was bought out by Gateway and they were eventually bought out by a still alive oem today can't remember who but gateway laptops came out with new models so it's soul still lives on
@@trashtronics1700 emachines was a ok brand but it was not that great I had two desktop computers made by them
16:26 that MajorGeeks download button
I grabbed a copy off the shelf from my local pc hardware shop on release. I couldn't believe a legit copy of Windows was only £30. I found out why when my windmodem refused to work after ME was installed. It helpfully offered to go online to find a working driver. :-)
hi good video thx indeed my fastet computer boot was like 1 or 2s in a z80 based machine with 64kb of ram of which 8 or not much more for the os lol (not changeable)
CLIPPY!!!! He and Bonzai Buddy :)
Used it back in the day and got rid of it real fast.
"It is I, Bonzi..I thank you for raising me from my grave. Allow me to make for you a memorable internet experience....."
Ad Ad Ad Ad Ad Ad virus, permanent ie search redirect, malware, bsod...
"There you are. You are welcome. "
@@devil8975 Hahaha so true :)
Early Win95 and Win98 were both as quick to crash as a WinME upgrade. It is the lack of MSDOS support that really made it as unpopular as it was.
So many memories! I had ME. No problems whatsoever in my experience. Most of the problems I read about at the time were mostly down to poor drivers or such, which to be fair, Microsoft wasn't responsible for. Just my 2 pennies worth.
Yep it was mostly piss poor driver support for ME from the likes of eMachines, HP, Compaq, etc.. along with companies again like eMachines selling their base model machines with barely enough RAM to run ME, along with slow as dog snot Celerons, and their crap onboard graphics.
Never had any problems with Windows Me during my use of it definately the clean install was the way to go with it and also installing the most current drivers certainly helped with stability everyone i installed it for at the time loved it.
I would say you got lucky, most if not all the stability issues were people like yourself who installed windows 98 drivers instead of the proper ME drivers. Sure they look like they work but one VXD or DLL mismatch and bang blue screen. I think the computer you used was over spec for the time too which probably helped.
If you were to install something like a Geforce 4 graphics card in that E Machines PC it would make a pretty good Windows 9X retro gaming PC. Having said that, I think you would probably need to upgrade the PSU as well but I would encourage doing so in any case for a PC of this age.
My Mom had bought a Dell Dimension L Series (budget) PC in 2000 and it came with ME, despite me trying to convince her to get it with 98 SE. It was 50/50 with us. If we didn't push it too hard it was ok. More often the programs we would run would crash a lot, than the OS itself. I do remember several times the OS corrupting and we would have to get DOS running again before repairing ME. That was a pain the a**. We upgraded to XP Pro in 2004 and it was WAY more stable.
Of course that was an issue with 9x stability in general, less about ME in general.
@@kovyvuri I never experienced the amount of crashes on 98 SE, and no OS corruption either.
Awesome review! Keep up the good job Dan!
I moved from 98 to ME and it was fine, but I didn't have many DOS games in the first place. I have vivid memories of having to re-install Windows 98, but not of ME. Might be because it was more stable, might be because it didn't take long until XP from there.
I think it was down to certain systems that had issues. In all the clean installs I did I never seen an issue. In fact for me it seemed more stable than less stable. I still have a PC I built in that era with Me on it. It is a P3, Voodoo 5 system that was a great gaming system.. Never an issue and I loved how fast it booted up.
I bought it on day one, it had a launch offer for the upgrade, it was £30 as far as I remember the first few months..
It was awful at the beginning but did get much better with updates
BSOD was a huge problem at first
Day one technology gives errors every time
I tried Windows ME on 3 computers back in the day. The first one Blue Screened as soon as the desktop came up. The Second one was fine for a couple days then Blue Screened at random. The third one worked as long as you didn't open Internet Explorer. All three were fresh installs, but I tired Windows 2000 on the same machines, and they ran wonderfully.
Only one computer was mine, the other two I was fixing for people who were having issues. But downgraded the two I was fixing back to Win98 and they were fine.
Our second computer came it. Worked just fine. Was immune to some of the viruses that was spreading around early XP too. Only upgraded to XP later due to peer pressure.
Some computer (video) games will make it crash in the old win98 way (unlike xp). Likewise some video editing etc. after hours of usage.
Advantages of WinMe though include old win98 drivers for many scanners, printers, midi soundcards and game controllers (decent flightsticks etc., if you have the driver disks) as winxp simply won't support those. It is good to know when you have the usb mass storage device support in WinMe (as a crutch).