Windows Me - Microsoft's Biggest Failure

[@alex_and_er_g]

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

[@pomponi0]

I have faint memories of fixing lots of stuff in ME but even if I wasn't that young at the time (I was 14), I'm quick to unlearn stuff and adapt to new environments so it feels like just a fever dream.

[@tomikaka]

@@pomponi0 what a good weakness to have 🤣

[@pomponi0]

@@tomikaka The OS installstion screen literally gave me flashbacks of the first time I formatted a PC lmao. I had 256MB of RAM, too little to run the powerful XP and I wasn't going to use an old af OS like Windows 98.

[@tomikaka]

@@pomponi0 I only encountered Windows ME on my grandpa's old PC. My first computer already had 4 Gigabytes of ram.

[@bariltrailette]

@@tomikaka 4 giga of ram can run windows 10 i think.

[@earthboiproductions2407]

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

[@JhanOjan]

Funny thing was windows 2k and windows ME are 2 different OSes under the hood. Windows ME was just DOS executable program like other Win 9X version, meanwhile Windows 2000 based on NTKernel which is used by their modern OS today. Tech savvy in the late 90s knows this very well. They just has similar UI to end user because Microsoft has a lazy RnD UI/UX designer team 🤭

[@Ometecuhtli]

Well NT's previous version was 3.51 and didn't follow the year of release naming convention, but I doubt anyone who used the previous NT and 9X would confuse the 2 after 1 minute of using them.

[@unavailable7666]

Microsoft likes to make confusion. Look how they mark xbox consoles. Xbox One x was mistaken with xbox series x, so people were buying older console thinking it's newer. .

[@moviestuffjunk9174]

win 2000 & win 2000 server were the enterprise version.

[@michelefarroni93]

@@Ometecuhtli there was nt 4.0

[@KayleeCee]

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

[@ranchocommodorereef]

I can imagine your brother must have been disappointed when you guys had to go back to Windows 98.

[@yumDOOM]

xD

[@vermilion6667]

I remember starting this PC normally for about a month, then some bullshit like "WinLogOn.exe has stopped working" along with Brontox virus (which I remember it was written in Indonesia about save the environment). Despite all that annoyance, yeah. I grew up with that and enjoy using ME along with XP, Vista, 7.

[@raminybhatti5740]

😂😂

[@firstnamerequiredlastnameo3473]

MS ME lasted one week on my computer, then trash can.

[@gracefullynadine864]

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

[@LimaOscar88]

Yep, exactly the same experience as you.

[@jonesymate581]

Same here

[@AGZhark]

Me, but with 7, so I was left assuming all computers were slow and laggy.

[@Pau_Pau9]

It crashed just as much as 98 and 95!

[@awii.neocities]

@@AGZhark Are you mixing it up with Vista? Unless you had a crappy netbook or an extremely out of date PC, 7 ran well on most computers to my knowledge

[@jqlio18]

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

[@nationsquid]

That is awesome!! Love to hear that! :)

[@theeclipsemaster]

Oh cool

[@orphenocou4742]

Well done! Turning tragedy to triumph, lemons into lemonade! Huzzah!!

[@theeclipsemaster]

@@orphenocou4742 when life gives you lemons, dont make lemonade! Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I dont want your darn lemons, what am i supposed to do with these!?

[@callumgreen6383]

@@theeclipsemaster Okay Mr Johnson

[@roygaya]

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

[@Thermalburn]

Same here lol. I feel like I work in the tech field now because as a kid i had to constantly troubleshoot our family computer running windows ME. Either I fixed it, or I didnt get to play to Quake 3 lol

[@anssiaatos]

I never thought about this but I have exactly the same past experiences! Thank you Windows ME, you weren't so bad after all!

[@ZaCloud-Animations___she-her]

​@@anssiaatos Oh it WAS so bad. It's just that we made lemonade out of that lemon. 😂

[@arnautarnautsen2564]

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

[@Tornado1994]

Wow. It was THAT BAD?

[@darthrainbows]

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

[@Karter_Flores]

LMFAOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[@DrillOnABeat]

How does an OS installment bring down an entire Network 😭

[@pioneer1131]

LOL

[@eupher2]

That is really funny.

[@nabawi7]

@@Flameb0 wait seriously?? 😂 😂

[@BrianandKarina]

I love the way you condense the videos and explain the story very well, but do you know where I could find some Windows Office 21 keys? I've been having some problems with these programs lately.

[@manu55pool]

BNH Software helped me get a good office key so that in the future I would not have any problems.

[@BrianandKarina]

It is important that you say thank you very much and excuse my comment

[@caacrinolass3501]

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

[@lukeonuke]

Ah yes the "it fixed itself"

[@henryd3bby]

Same happened with my Windows 10

[@alainportant6412]

No you are confused

[@looweegee252]

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

[@praetorian3902]

Ok first of all : LOL that was funny. I remember also not wanting to go to XP from Me because my games weren't working on XP when it released. Compatibility issues, so I was like "fuck this" and stuck with Me until 2004 when someone informed me they had patched it significantly. So yeah maybe he didn't want to move for compatibility reasons. I wouldn't have budged either. Then 2004, XP, been using it until new games wouldn't work on it.

[@Pidalin]

@@praetorian3902 I completely agree with you, people have really short memory, they don't remember real reasons why people used Win 98/ME for so long time. Ofcourse XP was better OS, but I remember how popular 90s games were and I am not talking only about DOS games, even early Windows games had problems in XP, so I switched to XP permanently I think in 2005, but I was still sad for games which don't work there. I've just built my dream Win ME PC with tualatin Pentium III and GeFroce Ti4200 and I realized that compatibility of some games is not only about Windows, some games need specific GPU drivers to make it run, it's really complicated with some games. For example Aliens vs Predator, I know, there is fixed GOG version, but I like to play original versions just for fun and original AvP is really hard to make functional. There are sound and graphics glitches in XP, but even in 98/ME it's not so easy. I don't understand how could we make all those games functional when I was 11 or 12 years old, I was probably smarter than today. :-D

[@praetorian3902]

@@Pidalin What a nice reply, I enjoyed reading it. And you helped me remember some nostalgic things like Avp, Geforce Ti4200 so that was also appreciated. Yeah when you're 11-13yo AND have Pentium 3 back in the day you feel like the luckiest kid ever because every game would run smoothly. I played Sims 1 on my first PC AMD 150 Mhz and it lagged like hell, took me 1 minute to have my sim move to the next room (that taught me patience), was doing my homework while waiting for that to happen lol. Then upgraded to 750 Mhz and couldn't stop smiling the first time I played. I remember going to my friend's house to play Comanche 3 the first time and I was like "wow you got a Pentium 3 !!!" lol We were cute when we were kids weren't we :)

[@Pidalin]

@@praetorian3902 You enjoyed my broken English? :-) I had always really good HW, but mostly like 5 years after it was relevant. :-) I had my first Pentium II (400 MHz) in 2004, later I had some PIII 550 MHz and GF5200, we played even FarCry on that, it was almost unplayable, but who cares, start game and see it was enough. :-) When I try it today with similar HW, I realize how badly all those games worked on that but I don't remember it, I have only nostalgic and good memories about playing on that, today we are angry when FPS jumps down from 90 to 70, it's really funny compared to how we played back in the day. :-)

[@praetorian3902]

@@Pidalin Your English is great. Yeah I think it's mostly young gamers that complain about the FPS (12-22yo) because when you're a gamer from the late 90s early 2000s, you KNOW what real FPS drop means xD

[@MostafaAhmedAhmed81]

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

[@lauratiso]

I was a consumer and I used 2000 until 2005, when I finally upgraded to XP.

[@Mrshoujo]

If you think you had to reinstall Windows ME every few months, you are the error, not the comluter.

[@tarajoe07]

I gamed on 2k until I couldn't any longer

[@tarajoe07]

​@@Mrshoujohahaha. Windows ate itself every time. It wasn't the computer. It was the trash OS

[@CamiloSinger]

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

[@Windows_Solvees]

not that bad

[@SinaelDOverom]

My experience was the opposite. ME was much more stable for me than 98SE.

[@Pidalin]

Win 98 had completely same problems with stability, ME is just like Win 98 with extra service pack. I remember installing Win 98 SE every week, it was really unstable os, ME was better I think, when you installed drivers really for ME, that's important. 98 drivers mostly worked, but it could cause stability problems or other bugs.

[@markzhang2507]

Well, I had these problems about Windows ME having a shitty startup that kept on crashing every time it occurs. In 2000 before I was born, my family bought a computer that operates Windows ME and they got pissed off on starting it up, due to this preposterous phenomena that I said before. When they tried to ask a computer specialist to fix it, it did not work well, and it continued that shitty problem that it had before. So you're right that Windows ME keeps on crashing, especially when it tries to start up.

[@the_kombinator]

Sounds like me with XP vs Vista.

[@TheOneGuy1111]

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

[@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge]

Same, I always knew of 95, 98 and XP. But I was always curious why boxes would also mention these mythical "2000, ME" versions when mentioning compatible OSs.

[@JJAB91]

Honestly I wouldn't be surprised if most people not deep into computing did that. 95 then 98 then XP. Just as many people skipped Vista and even Windows 8 and went from XP to 7 to 10.

[@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge]

@@JJAB91 Mine went from 98 to XP to 7 to XP to 10 to 7 to 10 again, and now to Linux and probably 7 again.

[@realthemariogamer]

@@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge LMAO that's a very interesting upgrade history

[@Kromiball]

@@GlamStacheessnostalgialounge What the hell happened

[@stew6662]

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

[@ragankelly9571]

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

[@nationsquid]

Very insightful information. Thank you for taking the time to comment, and thanks for watching! :)

[@seven7000_]

man you wasted 10 years worth of your touchscreen keyboard trying to type this comment 😂😂😂😂

[@jamm6_514]

In short the made a broken product of something that could be decent trying to make it over appealing by filling it with useless garbage, that and/or intentionally making the system shitty so people would switch to XP

[@HatTrex]

Very interesting and insightful, thanks.

[@BBayjay]

My thoughts exactly. Thanks for this additional information

[@KwanLowe]

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

[@kayemm_86]

This. No crash without taking a few files with it, often quite important ones, which ruined the OS installation or at least the program you were using. It was horrendous.

[@BType13X2]

The system restore was such a POS it was a lie as well.... "Restore failed." Okay well looks like I'm formating cause this POS bricked itself again.

[@pflaffik]

re-installs was the goto solution of amateurs, i too used to re-install 98SE before i learned how to fix issues. The internet was just too full of bs advices on how to fix issues, we really thought re-install was a recommended practice.

[@KwanLowe]

@@pflaffik Re-installs were the quickest way to fix ME failures because the corruption not only deleted files, but often left open files in an unknown state. In a crash FAT32 couldn't update metadata reliably, so it was a potshot whether they were valid. Recovery solutions included copying files from another installation or from a (hopefully) recent backup. Of course there were issues with this, as ME stored files in dozens of locations and it wasn't a small install (relatively speaking, based on hard drive sizes of the day). In some cases, the OS could take up 10%-20% of typical hard drive space so a ready backup to existing disk wasn't always feasible. Yes, re-install was often the best option and was the Microsoft recommendation. (Yes, I was a PC support technician at this time.) 98SE was a different beast and didn't suffer the from the ME horrors.

[@nickygepetto6684]

I laughed out loud on that one. So true. I had to use ME at work and not only ran two external file back ups per day, I also operated the computer in a LITERAL STATE OF TERROR never knowing when the entire system would crash. I only used external drives to save anything.

[@L0rdG1gabyt3]

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

[@samihanski4086]

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

[@alwaysangry2232]

i was when my brother changed 98 with 2000 and couldnt play dos games

[@rayhanrizvi334]

i did not even know win me existed until a few months ago. my first Os was win xp when i was 6 in 2011

[@rgm4646]

Well I was 25 back then. I have been in the computer industry ever since then and It wasnt as bad as people say. DONT GET ME WRONG. it wasnt great. It was OK at best. BUT, it wasnt that damn bad. I look at it as a transition period. 16 and 32 bit. I get the feeling that people who make these videos werent even BORN or were 10 when windows ME was released.

[@TheJadeFist]

About the same, I was using ME up till like 2005 or 6.

[@Pidalin]

@@alwaysangry2232 That's a good point, it's easy to judge ME now, but today people have no idea what was ME good for. It was last Win 9x OS with DOS support, but it already had some modern features from Win 2000, so it was actually good OS for home user in 2000. Also boot time was really good compared to Win 2000. People in 2000 needed mainly support for older software and games, so Win 2000 (even when it was good OS) was useless for them.

[@CmdrKeene]

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

[@nationsquid]

Yikes!! I cannot imagine being promised XP and then getting ME. That's like being promised a Corvette and then getting a FIAT. Sorry you had to deal with that! 😂

[@pocketstationman6364]

@@nationsquid A FIAT is still loads better than a Windows Me PC. LOL

[@flapflapflapflap]

@@nationsquid dont you mean a Trabant?

[@jnicolas92]

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

[@jesse7631]

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

[@kootunesscrewy]

2000 and Windows Me. Meh. I didn't like them. They were basically the same as 95 and 98, but ugly in my opinion. Despite having some upgraded features. But I respect ya.

[@C21H30O2]

​@@kootunesscrewy ya do know you could customize the ui right?

[@russ254]

@@kootunesscrewy 2:29 Win2k is Microsoft’s best OS ever. Everything since has just been as good, and no better than Win2k. (it did everything it was supposed to do, every single time, and was rock solid stable.)

[@kootunesscrewy]

@@russ254 It's just my opinion, lol.

[@christaylorakaskunk]

@@russ254 My opinion of Win7

[@sayyedal-afghani]

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

[@donkthedankee8595]

May allah bless Imam Khomeini

[@edwardeduardus7398]

Interesting story. My impression also though experience working with them, they miss the focus on planning, development and delivery and more too much towards sales.

[@nickwallette6201]

This is a much more accurate interpretation. _Some_ consumers may have been confused about the difference between 2K and ME, but Microsoft was always very clear on this. The Enterprise track was NT-based, the home track was 9x-based. They had been planning to merge the two kernels for a while, but the hardware requirements of NT were _substantial,_ and the average consumer wasn't ready for that yet. They needed a more lightweight OS, and that meant compromising the design to fit within the constraints of that limited hardware. ME was indeed a bit of an afterthought, but it wasn't an accident, and I would say that _most_ people had no trouble figuring out which product was right for them. I'm sure there were a few lost souls standing in the aisle of a computer store holding the two boxes side-by-side to figure out which was the right one, but probably no more than had done the same with NT Workstation 4.0 and Windows 95. We were all new to computers at some point in our lives. Just look at how many people ran Windows XP Pro at home, and tell me they absolutely _had to have_ domain login capability, multiple video cards, advanced file sharing features, or support for multiple CPUs. No, many just saw "Pro" and thought, "this is the better one, so I will buy this one." Anyway... Win 2K was slated to be the confluence of the two mainline Windows kernels, but there were a few very real problems with that: 1) It was _still_ a little bit heavy for consumer hardware -- particularly RAM. 2) It used a new driver model, and even de-facto commodity hardware had minimal support under NT. Your SCSI cards and NICs -- sure. No problem. But sound cards, 3D graphics, and MPEG decompression accelerators? Not so much... Even if there were drivers available, you probably wouldn't get complete functionality. You would be missing a lot of the bells and whistles. 3) Software hadn't been written to support a multi-user security model. Everyone was admin, all the time. Documents folders were in their directories right off of the drive root, or under the Windows directory. Writing to per-user document folders and having to deal with file system permissions (like being able to write to the program's installation folder) was a real problem. This made the migration to NT very painful for users, when programs would just crash or throw cryptic error messages on launch, exit, or just randomly. Mostly, it boiled down to: NT needed time for developers to get used to it. It had existed for a while, but it was kind of a niche product. People weren't running Paint Shop Pro and Doom95 under NT. They were running development environments, and GIS mapping programs, and databases. They ran on HP, IBM, and Compaq hardware -- not Bob's Computer Emporium white-box builds. This was clear to Microsoft, and they realized it wasn't quite the right moment to release Win2K to the masses. With the advent of Active Directory, it enjoyed massive success in the Enterprise space, though. People started using it instead of Windows 95/98 as their desktop OS at work. That meant NT was exposed to more hardware and more software, and developers and hardware OEMs got onboard to ensure compatibility and full support. This primed the market for XP's release, which was finally able to merge the two codebases, once and for all. I see the release of ME as Microsoft being agile enough to see the potential disaster of forcing everyone to NT before the market was ready. It was the right move, and even managed to bring the visual identity of the two products almost perfectly inline with each other. And if you've ever used NT 4.0 and 95, you know that the similarities pretty much end with a screenshot of an empty desktop, whereas (aside from obvious giveaways like the branding on the Start menu), you might not be able to tell the difference between ME and 2K quite so easily.

[@bchristian85]

2000 was the era of the cheap eMachines home PC and most of those came with 64MB of RAM. 128MB minimum was needed to run Windows 2000 well. I ran it on 64MB of RAM and that really just wasn't enough. As you say, there was also the driver issues with NT at the time. A lot of hardware aimed at consumers, such as sound and graphics cards, didn't have NT drivers or if they did, they didn't have some of the features of the 9x drivers. XP actually had a rough first year or so largely due to this issue. It's understandable why MS did ME, but they should have just delayed it a few months to get closer to 2000 and released 98SE as ME. Had they done that, it would have been a lot more well recieved. I've never seen ME run better than 98SE on any system.

[@KopperNeoman]

@@donkthedankee8595 I rebuke in Jesus' Holy Name any Satanic influence you wish upon anyone and everyone in the name of Allah the Greatest Deciever. also this is about computers, leave us alone

[@vasiliyt8600]

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

[@zmarotrix]

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

[@IanJones942]

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

[@UmVtCg]

So that means nothing could have been a hardware defect, driver issue or PICNIC problem.

[@den2k885]

It has been the only Windows that didn't ever crash on me in two years :D

[@PaulR1200]

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

[@EdwardBrockJunior]

The ME actually stood for Major Embarrassment.

[@nationsquid]

Haha! Fair enough.

[@aradhaymathur]

Nah, it is Mistake Edition

[@lucyrandomness6795]

Millennium edition

[@boovproductions8515]

@@axelestial r/sisthisaintreddit

[@andrive]

Many Errors

[@CoolDudeClem]

Windows 2000 is what windows ME SHOULD have been.

[@nationsquid]

Exactly!

[@RoadRunner592]

If there was an actual Home Edition of Windows 2000, XP probably wouldn't have been as popular or wouldn't have existed at all. History would have been entirely different.

[@Thanos.m]

yup I can see that I used windows 2000 up until 2011ish I'd say at that time it had just lost its support it was excellent very smooth and stable it was pretty much windows XP without the Luna theme

[@simonbone]

See my comment above. Windows 2000 would have been the next version of Windows for all users, but then the price of RAM went through the roof, so Microsoft suddenly called Win2K a "business" OS and rushed out Win Me for "home users". When RAM got cheap again, they tweaked Win2K slightly and released it under the name "Windows XP".

[@RoadRunner592]

@@Thanos.m I had a Slot 1 Pentium III computer from February 2000 with 256MB of RAM, a 32MB Nvidia Riva TNT2, and 20GB hard drive, so XP was a no go on that computer. It originally came with 98SE, but I put 2000 Pro with SP4 on it in 2003 and held onto that computer as a secondary until 2007.

[@Sonictheoofhog4]

Windows: Mistake Editon

[@ArgentStew]

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

[@petrihadtosignupforthis8158]

The first thing I learned after my 98 SE first time crashed with prejudice was partitioning and never storing personal and system files in same location.

[@DoAGoldeneye]

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

[@ItsLtime]

How the hell would you not confuse them as a non-tech person. As a tech person you know: 2000 is decent ME is a failed abortion

[@TheDunbartxeen]

Did exactlythe same. ME was so biggy that i felt justified using Windows 2000 instead. Stuck with it actually until Vista.

[@tanin200]

In 2010, when i’m on grade 8, my school still used ME to taught me in the computer class. While my computer at home, is windows 7. I’m crying a river.

[@I_love_miku39]

Why ME???

[@adai2008bro]

@@I_love_miku39because it’s you

[@I_love_miku39]

@@adai2008bro wtf did i mean

[@jheanelltabana8713]

That's terrible! My middle school had it on the PCs in 2002, and they eventually replaced the OS after several months, I don't recall with which one. They kept getting infected and crashing, but the replacement OS didn't have those problems.

[@adrian_veidt]

Year 2002 and our school still use windows 95-98 😂

[@KingSNAFU]

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

[@ressljs]

That's what I told myself about my first car to shield myself from the realization that I bought a lemon.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

Honestly, I never had much trouble with ME, at least no more than with other versions of Windows. I think that if I hadn't skipped 98SE and been up enough on tech to use updated drivers, that may have changed my attitude. It was the same issue with Vista where it was mostly fine, once stable drivers became available. I'd suggest that Windows 10 is worse than either ME or Vista as both of those could be booted in less than 5 minutes, whereas I don't get a working 10 log in under 10 minutes. I suppose, if I upgraded to an SSD, that might change it, but that's pretty poor.

[@madmattman5675]

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

[@henrikhyrup3995]

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

[@kennghost]

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

[@Zyugo]

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

[@nationsquid]

I think the *real* millennium edition would come out with XP the following year. My next video will be on Windows XP! So stay tuned for that! :)

[@StephenPhillips]

Despite Windows 2000 being a business-used OS, my family got away with using it for home use. I grew up with this operating system for a few years. To this day, I am thankful I did not end up with Windows ME.

[@D0NH]

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

[@VELVETPERSON]

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

[@Pidalin]

Same for me, ME had one big advantage over 98 - most of old HW worked without installing drivers, and that was really important in time when most of people didn't have internet. I remember hard times with Win 98 when it was crashing only because of bad drivers or something (people didn't have internet, so they were just randomly trying some random drivers with hope it will work), ME had same problem, but many things worked immediately after OS installation so there was less risk that you break it by installing some extra drivers. But this is valid for max 1999 HW, with newer, you needed install drivers, logically.

[@dvogonen]

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

[@peptoyo]

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

[@BType13X2]

I second this, I liked using 2000 more than XP,.

[@pflaffik]

2000 replaced NT4, not in the same segment as ME. What made win2000 possible for home users was compatibility with 98/ME, while NT4 was not.

[@yegfreethinker]

Me too. It was sexy in its modest understated look.

[@UriahChristensen]

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

[@the_kombinator]

Man, I was able to install ME on a Pentium 60 with a VESA video card and a slow ass Seagate hard disk - sound was handled by an 8 bit Soundblaster, and the CDROM was a BTC unit. PURE SHIT. But it actually somehow did work. I sold that thing in the classifieds...

[@avert_bs]

@Alexander Ratisbona definitely the exception than the norm.

[@namelessguy933]

@@alexanderratisbona6614 Microsoft remove Real DOS-mode in order to make its OS more stable and faster to boot up. But regardless, you could still bring back Real DOS-mode to Windows ME, these patches exists long ago and still now by different user with more updated things. Windows ME use latest MS-DOS version, unlike 98 which is 7 version.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

I liked WinMe's features, but it was a buggy mess. If you had a prebuilt with Me it seemed to fair better than a custom PC. I've seen a lot of computers run fine with Win98SE, 2000, and XP and crash and lock on WinMe.

[@TheLionAndTheLamb777]

@@the_kombinator I would expect VESA Video and a 8 Bit Blaster on a 386 or 486 but I have never seen a Pentium with it. That looks like a odd system all the way around. I didn't see many Pentium 60's in the day either come to think of it.

[@15725867905]

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

[@fargeeks]

Hey it's Mac Os X Not Mac Os 10

[@olivia7546]

@@fargeeks actually tim cook always pronounced it os 10 🤓

[@fargeeks]

@@olivia7546 I sure as hell never read such a term

[@hnmAck]

It might feel nostalgic, specially because you missed the social factor of a shared experience with the majority. Only the shared experience was bs software thx to Ms, screams and headaches

[@RenanMMz]

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

[@tjmagnuson6692]

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

[@Brunorego80]

Same here. Most people never really understood how Windows 9x and ME worked. It requires a lot of knowledge in terms of driver installation, IRQ's, BIOS settings, etc. to make them run smoothly, which most people don't have. They see a blue screen and they think the O.S. is crap. He didn't even mention the native USB 2.0 support that ME had, which might seem insignificant today, but it was a great feature. Also, you can still play DOS games perfectly fine under Windows ME. Gaming in general is better in ME when compared to Windows 2000 for example. Like you said, it was a nice updated version of Windows 98SE but with a Windows 2000 theme.

[@tyleyden8695]

Cant tell if you're trolling or not

[@florinelfr8457]

Back then you were the same age as I am today :( unless you are trolling, then screw you

[@DailyCorvid]

@@tyleyden8695 he isn't trolling but stuff old people do seems as if it is trolling, as it basically makes no sense if you were not alive back then. We are assuming you were not but who knows, I certainly was. I can verify as an old person myself, that this is true. He likes the challenge, newer generations cannot bear a challenge lol they break down in tears at the mere thought of the challenge, that TJM uses to keep himself sharp. It's a different mindset from a different time, back then we needed to be sharp and know how to solve new problems ... Todays lot have no interest in this as the OS's are barely configurable let alone accessible for proper troubleshooting!

[@ozzyp97]

@@Brunorego80 ME is still just a worse, buggier 98SE for the most part though. USB support is better out the box, sure, but DOS is much worse. It'll run most newer games, but as soon as you need full DOS mode you're basically screwed for no real reason. It's also slower, if not by a huge amount.

[@MoxieCatte]

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

[@hnmAck]

Same experience and also started liking xp since the service patches. By the SPs also winxp had more time released and by consequence more drivers being developed. I knew I was lucky (Meanwhile everyone else cried in frustration) that my specific pc configuration was liked by winme and didn't had any major issues than reinstalling once every year

[@DokkanAssets]

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

[@ranchocommodorereef]

In the case with Windows Vista.

[@Henradley]

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

[@FiftyshadesofAA]

Shut up woman

[@lachinelli]

I wonder the hell you had to go through to explain to her what BSODs were. La pantalla azul de la muerte.

[@Henradley]

@@lachinelli lol she would refer to it as la maldita pantalla azul 😂

[@lachinelli]

@@Henradley I can't remember what my mother said when a BSOD struck, but it was hell. Luckily her newer computers have ran Windows 7 and 10 and BSODs are a distant nightmare in our memories.

[@Henradley]

@@lachinelli ohhh yeah mi mamá gave up on PCs after that and has stuck to iPad and her iPhone since those came out.

[@fruitieplayys9125]

The list of microsft's biggest failure -Windows ME -Windows Vista -Windows 8 -Windows 11 Im switching to linux..

[@VERRATENMEMESANDCOD]

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

[@nationsquid]

I know this feeling all too well.

[@VERRATENMEMESANDCOD]

@@nationsquid :)

[@kyanoang3l0_old]

Me on a "metered" connection: Nope. :p

[@riponrip4574]

Me on a Mac, yeah mate

[@idkanymore3382]

Lame joke

[@ReaperX7]

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

[@bcatbb2896]

you are absolutely right, i just remembered that too. If you leave the computer on for the whole day it will be so slow you would be forced to restart to regain the ram speed again lol

[@drakkenmensch]

The only fix for that was to install and run the program called RAMpage which would release RAM back to the system.

[@redsheephaternation1423]

I just can't believe that all major companies and youtubers (like you) that talk about Windows Me say that the operating system was the worst version of Windows ever made. That's not true. It's the best version of Windows other than Windows XP and Windows 7. It was only slow, unstable and buggy on many computers because people didn't install the correct drivers for the operating system, or it was another mistake they made with the hardware (like upgrading the operating system without upgrading other components.) If I were to avoid any version of Windows, I would avoid Windows 2000 and Windows 10. I wish I could also include Windows 11, but I got a gaming computer with that operating system for Christmas. But then again, it's making me angry as well. Now I wish that I could finish creating my video about how Windows Me, XP and 7 (particularly certain editions and service packs) should be supported again, because tomorrow I have to go back to high school, which will severely slow down my progress on the project. 😡

[@JoshoshFan]

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

[@thetechhelper2760]

What tablet was it?

[@russ254]

baloney

[@francisluglio6611]

Do you have any idea what you’re saying?

[@folterknecht1768]

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

[@mernok2001]

2.5 mm2 aluminum will handle 16A without any problem if you have good connections.

[@moshingsafely]

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

[@Tornado1994]

Panther was pretty awful too.

[@NortShip01]

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

[@LOLOX_HD]

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

[@malrofo]

I worked cable tech support and people called in constantly complaining about everything turning into boxes. Nobody seemed to like it

[@MacabreDaymare]

Windows 8 and 11 have been the worst OS for me. Windows 8 for the obvious reasons and Windows 11 for the amount of issues it has.

[@russ254]

Win8 worked as well as win10 and used 20% of the ram. much better os than 10.

[@tahaak]

I think there is a difference between a stable OS with a bad UI and a straight up unstable OS. I think Windows 8 was fine, although its UI really wasn’t thought through.

[@JAMESMANHUNT9]

I went from 7 to 10 on my first dell Inspiron I'm currently on my Third laptop

[@bitemykrank1970]

ME was so good, I had the 25 digit product key MEMORIZED.....I had to use it so many times when the OS corrupted itself for no reason, it stuck in my head for years after.....

[@Obelion_]

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

[@elijahfordsidioticvarietys8770]

Well, it was so bad that they had to replace it with XP only a year later, so I assume it sucked.

[@windowsme7532]

:(

[@windowsme7532]

😢

[@elijahfordsidioticvarietys8770]

@@windowsme7532 you’re so self centered, Windows Me! Always “me me me!”. Why don’t you think about other people.

[@aszhara2900]

Windows XP is BiS tho

[@jaykebird2go]

I think you misunderstood the video or something, they didn't "have to" replace it, XP was coming out either way. Microsoft just wanted to put out something quick while they were still working on what would become XP.

[@rdxdt]

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

[@BassBastiforever]

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

[@brucewrigleysgumchewz4667]

Now we're stuck with slow ass buggy MTP file transfer.

[@lachinelli]

Really? in my case, if you did that, you were probably going to get a BSOD. Hell, I even got BSODs when idle.

[@BrockLeyland]

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

[@sloeginandsleep1170]

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

[@ehkirkio]

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

[@isallah1kafir196]

Early 1998, I had Win 98 running on my own PC when it pulled in one Virus. Friend suggested I shall switch to Linux. I did. Then in 2001 I was ask to help one person to fix Windows-Me on her PC. Another friend usually took care of her, but he moved towns. So I encountered Windows-Me for the first (and only) time. I had started with Win 3.11 on one Laptop, but I felt Windows-Me was the worst I encountered. I could not fix the problems, (had to search the Internet then I discovered it was one Virus) and since she used just a few basic programs, no gaming she wanted me to install Linux. Wiped the PC clean, installed ME just in case, and one simple Desktop-Linux, So I made the PC dual-boot. When she wanted to play some games she used Win, (as for that it was usable ASFAIR) , she unplugged the cable to the modem so that she was off-line, as she did not want to spend a lot of money on Anti-virus Software. For serious work though, she needed to be online, writing letters and e-mails to friends (in another script as she was from Bulgaria) she used the Linux I had installed. Years later when it came to replace her computer and my other friend got her one with one newer Windows (maybe XP) her world was made whole again. She did not need Linux any longer. But *Windows-Me was so bad in those years that other people fed up with the OS changed over to Linux* entirely....

[@chucku00]

Well, since CD writing software were always provided with CD-R drives, the built-in WinME CD-R software wasn't a real advantage, on the contrary it performed really poorly compared to Nero or even Adaptec EZ-CD Pro.

[@isallah1kafir196]

@@chucku00 Well I used Linux and I still got CD-R from before 2000, that I burned using a script in one terminal no fancy eye-candy but later I did switch to a GUI-version, haven't burned a CD or DVD in a very long time....

[@chucku00]

@@isallah1kafir196 I know cdrdao (and also k3b) were available before 2000, I was just responding to Kirk about the fact the embedded WinME CD-R software was easy to use but really simplistic compared to older Win9x third party software that allowed to write CD-Rs in ways that aren't supported by the WinME CD-R utility (SAO, hybrid, UDF, RAW or even copy PlayStation discs). But thanks for making me think about installing K3B on my Linux system since I still have to write some CD or DVD from time to time.

[@isallah1kafir196]

@@chucku00 Thanks I've installed my first Linux SuSE 5.2 in 1998 and have used many distro versions. Ubuntu now since 2013 I have absolute no experience with Win-CD-burn software. Take care.

[@craigtheduck]

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

[@A_G_w_R]

It had a good experience with you,but now with windows ME

[@praetorian3902]

He probably didn't tell you about needing to reformat every month and reinstall every driver. I remember that part lol. But for some reason I wasn't complaining.

[@hawkeyestiguy]

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

[@thelatiosmaster]

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

[@du0lol]

Nice vid! You got right a lot of stuff. There's two things I'd like to add, though, that felt like they got lost to time. First: Windows Me started Microsoft's tradition of dressing non-critical errors in critical clothes. Before Windows Me, lots of blue screen errors were critical, meaning that if you reached a BSOD, you would have to reboot your system, but this wasn't the case with Windows Me. I would often point this out to people and see them shocked to find out that you just had to press Space and the computer would resume working as if nothing had happened. Secondly, Windows XP SUCKED on release. It was super slow, still had no compatibility with DOS gam-err, applications, and was very unstable. When it came out and was also shit, my friends and I all went back to Windows 98, or stuck with Windows Me. A couple years later, a while after SP2's release, we finally upgraded. By then, Windows XP was about as good as Windows 98. Giving people enough time to get used to the system really is key, it seems.

[@hnmAck]

I was there and I saw them dismissing and suffering, going back to 98 and now they are like rose colored glasses on XP as if it was an excellent OS day one :rolleyes: I did waited for the SPs too. Windows ME ran great in my system and unexpectedly stable (Also knew it was an exception. Windows ME just liked my hardware config)

[@du0lol]

@@hnmAck as I often say, Windows Me was very fast, but mostly because nothing worked on it so it didn't ever get bloated. Jokes aside, it was much faster than XP, at least as far as I recall. Felt like Windows 98 2 or something.

[@krush454]

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

[@syscruncher]

I was beta testing both versions at the same time, thus teenage me was always confused by people’s confusion back then. W2k will always have a special nostalgic place for me since my testing efforts netted me a free copy from Microsoft and I just felt super-cool running NT while all my friends were still in 9x land. 🤣😂

[@Fedaykin24]

There is a really important factor that this video misses out and having been there at the time and actually someone who purchased Windows ME it needs to be mentioned...Windows ME was intended as an upgrade for the large installed Windows 95 user base who wanted features seen in Windows 98SE. The introduction of Windows 95 massively increased the number of domestic Microsoft Windows users, I remember the hype around Windows 95 and the rush to buy a PC when it was introduced. In my case as a 16yo in 1996 my parents purchased an Olivetti PCS75 with Windows 95 for school use...or game use as far as I was concerned! A great many of those Windows 95 buyers were not going to upgrade to Windows 98 considering they had a perfectly modern and stable functioning Windows 95 machine. By the time they got to 2000 95 was starting to creak and those first time PC buyers were considering an upgrade, lets not forget a PC at the time was a significant and expensive purchase. I remember that Olivetti cost my parents more than my first car just for example, the idea of junking such an expensive working machine was not realistic for many people so Millenium Edition was heavily marketed to 95 users as an upgrade that would bring their machine up to the latest spec. To that end I remember the electronics shops with shelved full of the cheaper upgrade copy of Windows ME with labels on them clearly stating it was an upgrade to 95. It was the version I actually purchased, installation required you to use the 95 disc for verification albeit it did allow a clean install option. The problem was that initial Windows 95 user base had never done an upgrade install before and also expected all their myriad programmes peripheral devices many dos based to just work on ME...it was an almost inevitable disaster. With an up to date machine you could get it to run fairly stable, the thing is that was not happening in most cases as people were attempting to install it on 5yo or more machines. Interestingly exactly the same happened with the launch of XP as the remaining 95 users and 98 users attempted to upgrade even older machines to work with the new OS. Whilst XP was beloved by the IT community by the time the plug was eventually pulled on support when it was launched 98SE and Win2K users derided it.

[@durrcodurr]

I upgraded from Windows 98 to ME when it came out, and it worked perfectly for me. After upgrading to Windows 2000 (which I also bought when it was released), I experienced some of those 60,000 known bugs that Windows 2000 had (in the beginning). :D Windows XP was also very buggy in the beginning, and in 2004, I finally made the mental transition to Linux. BTW, I really liked Windows Vista and Windows 8.x, despite of their shortcomings. But Windows 2000 was by far the most bug-ridden that I've seen. Windows Vista had a weird feature in that it emulated GDI in software, which slowed down all GDI applications. In Windows 7, they finally introduced Direct 2D and based GDI on it.

[@johnny5805]

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

[@mxmln8699]

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

[@direktive4]

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

[@mirroredchaos]

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

[@nationsquid]

Fair enough! Yes I have heard that a lot of people had issues on the hardware side of things when it came to running Me.

[@lachinelli]

Wasn't as bad? It was a miracle if you could use it for more than one hour and not run on a BSOD.

[@mirroredchaos]

@@lachinelli maybe I should get a lottery ticket. I never ran into a bsod.

[@DrewWalton]

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

[@stephenhosking7384]

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

[@Woodzta]

I loved my Windows ME box, but it was frustrating to have it freeze all the time! It wouldn't give me any error or restart itself or anything. It would just stop... as if time itself had stopped.

[@r.g.c.3897]

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

[@robertstephens1203]

Another good video. FYI, it's not pronounced Windows "M-E" but Windows "Me" as in "It's all about me". That's not a minor point because when Microsoft called it "Me", it added to the confusion. At the time, I remember people asking what was this operating system's claim to fame. Why buy it instead of W2000? Oh, it's called "Me" implying that it's very user friendly in contrast to the professionalism of W2000 and will lead "me" into the new millennium, one BSOD at a time.

[@Big_Tex]

Eh, I’ve always thought the ME complaints were overblown. I used ME for maybe 5 years and had no real problems, I liked it well enough. It was hardly unusable. I saw it was obviously an evolution over Win 98. About the same time I started using Win 2000 at work, my first taste of NT, and could see pretty obviously they were not the same OS.

[@Gatorade69]

Maybe you just got lucky. Most people were plagued with random BSODs all the time.

[@richardfld]

Same here, used me for about 2-3 years and had no major issues. Only the odd drive issue here and there but nothing that couldn't be sorted.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@Gatorade69 The same could be said for pretty much all the MS OSes of that era. The driver situation was a mess and the software installation was a mess. It wasn't until really Vista that that really changed, but that didn't get much credit as the driver situation at launch was so bad.

[@Gatorade69]

@@SmallSpoonBrigade It seemed that the drivers on Win98 were at least better than the ME ones. Really ME was just a flash in the pan it seems like it didn't last long before XP came along. I never really had driver issues in XP and personally had more driver issues in Vista.

[@Icy_vixen]

There should have been just windows 2000 with a classic DOS environment on top of the NT kernel to allow older software and games like what Apple did with Mac Os X and the classic environment of Mac OS 9.

[@vylbird8014]

Technically very difficult to do. DOS and NT worked in very different ways. NT - and all modern operating systems today - used virtual memory and memory protection. Each process has it's own address space, and is strictly confined within it - if it ever tries to access memory outside of the allowed area, the process is terminated. The program crashes - but the crash is contained. It doesn't take the whole operating system down in a bluescreen. Effective security is also impossible without memory protection, as a malicious process could simply read all the passwords and keys it wanted from everything else or mark itsself as privileged by editing the process table. Processes operating with memory protection also can't access hardware directly - they have to go via the OS API, asking the OS nicely for access to hardware resources, so the OS can do things like check if the process has permission to read a file before saying yes. DOS didn't have any of this. DOS was simple: It would run your program, and get out of the way. There was no need to deal with memory protection or virtual memory, because there was only one process running at a time. No APIs either. That's why you had to tell your old DOS games the details of your sound card model and configuration - there was no such thing as a sound card driver. Windows 95 and 98 and were hybrids, for backwards compatibility. They supported virtual memory and memory protection, but they didn't require protection, because requiring it would have broken almost all DOS programs. This was a very understandable decision: A big strength of Windows 95 was that you could run all your existing software on it without modification, be that business applications or games. A major advantage over something like OS/2 or one of the unix environments. But it also meant the operating system was unstable - as a single misbehaving process could bring the whole system down, every slight error was a potential bluescreen. And security was just a complete joke - it couldn't be done. The 9x family approach to security was ridiculously ineffective, because it was just a multi-user shell on top of a single-user kernel. That's why ME ditched most DOS compatibility, and XP did away with the rest: The commitment to supporting old DOS programs made it impossible to make the rest of the operating system stable and secure. You can run DOS programs on windows today using elaborate compatibility layers like DOSBox, but those are effectively just emulating hardware from the DOS era.

[@MultiDivebomber]

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

[@mattm7220]

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

[@ragankelly9571]

I have defended Me. I have defended Vista. But I will never, ever, while I still have a bit of dignity and sanity left, defend Windows 8.

[@JhanOjan]

@@ragankelly9571 even Microsoft regrets it by releasing windows 8.1 one year later 😂

[@tyleyden8695]

Exactly.

[@Stereocsx]

8.1 Are you seriously gonna forget me Oh wait in a way better editon

[@mattm7220]

@@Stereocsx Yea, 8.1 at least fixed *some* of 8's issues, so it's not completely abhorrent

[@HoldMyBlade]

Windows Me was the lost episode of Windows

[@nationsquid]

The one that Microsoft doesn't want you to know about. 👀

[@SSKJ64]

All we need now is the hyper-realistic blood

[@jasonleetaiwan]

This operating system or Windows 98 actually got me fired from a job because when you clicked "OK" in the calendar and you had a different date selected than the actual date, it would change the system settings on the date unknowingly. It wasn't instinctive at all. It was so easy to check the calendar, click on a date, and then click okay. Date changed without any warning. It wasn't until XP that they changed the calendar so that the "Okay" button said "Change date and time". Then it was clear. What happened was that the program I was working on would have the wrong date, and it would screw up the entire system. I did this unknowingly twice and the second time, he had me pinpointed to be fired the next wrong step I made. Anyway, a Windows OS issue that led to a real world problem.

[@eskilseter]

I had to reinstall Windows ME more times than I care to remember. It was giving me constant grief for the short time I used it (probably abou 9 months). Definitely the worst OS I ever tried. Vista had few issues on my computer; it worked pretty well.

[@foregonereality]

Vista SP2 was excellent. It was also the best looking OS imo. 7 was an optimised version of it but loved the look of Vista.

[@jesuszamora6949]

Vista was a fine OS if you had the hardware to run it. It's just that the hardware requirements were completely out of whack with the times. I fully expect Win 11 to have similar problems, and Win 10 to stuck around after 2025.

[@rayhanrizvi334]

@@jesuszamora6949 i never used vista before. but it looks similar to win 7, which i used before for literally my whole elementary years along with win xp

[@saricubra2867]

@@jesuszamora6949 Windows 11 is still basically the same Kernel since 8. I have an 11 year old laptop with a Core i3 that is slightly slower than a Core 2 Duo but using the OS (Windows 10) feels snappy compared to Vista and 7.

[@ibhaenggi]

@@jesuszamora6949 Windows 11 Actually has even WORSE problems. Look at the System Requirements. Jesus Christ, Microsoft, WHEN WILL YOU EVER LEARN!? THESE OEM MANUFACTUERS NEED TIME! DON'T RUSH IT OUT QUICKLY, MICROSOFT!

[@jesuszamora6949]

@@ibhaenggi I feel ya. I just updated my own hardware for that reason. Seriously, Ryzen 2000/8th gen Intel Core series as a base requirement? This is going to be Windows Vista all over again - a system that pisses people off in its lifetime, only to have features that people come to appreciate when Windows 12 comes by and becomes the internet darling

[@akusworld5117]

I never had any issue with ME... it was just a normal windows. People cry a lot when a new windows arrives. People will hate win 12 release and will say 10 is the best and 11 was not to bad. Not too long ago everyone hated 10 because 7 was the best. The only windows I never used was 8

[@Mateoski97]

They should've made a Home Edition and eventual Ultimate Edition of Windows 2000.

[@PhirePhlame]

What's funny, I've been using it on my nostalgia box for years and the only BSoD I ever got on it was my own fault - I'd prematurely ejected a floppy because I wasn't paying enough attention to what was on the screen. Dell Optiplex GX240 is the system which yields such good stability out of it for me.

[@AlistairMaxwell77]

all the drivers have been refined down to the final stable ones after all this time. a lot of the issues were 98 drivers that didn't get updated quickly in the initial launch

[@BNGamesYT]

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

[@AgiIeBeast]

I just realized the computer I had as a kid up until my teens ran on Windows Me, I'd use it everyday and get lots of errors which I thought was normal, I kinda learned from trying to fix the problems and get the house computer working again though lol, I then bought a bootleg version of XP and learnt about emulators, what good memories after that

[@Araminta22]

I had ME, and thought the errors were normal. Just had to save a lot and pay attention to how much tapping (thinking) sound the computer was making and stop what i was doing before it blue screened. Kinda like stopping the microwave when you hear the popcorn stop popping. It got me into problem solving basic computer issues which I thought was fun at the age of 7 and made every electronic from then on a piece of cake as far as troubleshooting. I'm just glad i didn't have to deal with it as an adult who needs to get actual work done.

[@krypticscythe2012]

I never even knew what Windows Me was! Nice video!

[@nationsquid]

Thank you for watching! :)

[@JimboJammy]

I was excited when I finally got a copy of ME. For me, it looked as though it had some cool features above 98 which I'd been using for years, I was itching for something newer, it looked more modern like 2000, but the best bit was it supported all my older hardware whereas, 2000 didn't have drivers available for things like my old mp3 player. I spent 3 days restoring all my files and music collection to the fresh install only for it to suddenly bluescreen when booting up a day later. I never figured out why it stopped booting and I ended up formatting again and going back to 98se. Never tried ME again and the next upgrade my pc got was to xp.

[@bonzibuddy4483]

Windows 2000 was actually an outstanding OS, even more stable than XP

[@xX_Pokeman_Xx]

Especially early on. People don't seem to remember this anymore, and I don't know why, but launch day XP and even into SP1, XP was arguably more unstable than Vista ever was. Hell, Vista got a massive amount of extra stability out of its first service pack, compared to XP which didn't seem to improve at all.

[@josephdadey]

I LOVED windows 2000. I worked for an MS outsourcer, and supported Windows 2000 for about 4 years.

[@rosiehawtrey]

2K was fine after a couple of service packs. It was a steaming turd when it came out.

[@WorldwideWyatt]

I actually ran windows 2000 x64 with no issues. I had a machine with ME for less than 6 months.

[@xX_Pokeman_Xx]

@@rosiehawtrey It did receive 5 SPs, but I didn't notice it actually being particularly any worse without them when I was testing their stability.