The History of Windows Me Development

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Windows Me has faced endless criticism over the years. It's regarded by many as the worst Windows release of all time. But how much of this criticism is deserved? Today we take a look at the development history of the infamous operating system. I take you though 4 development builds and discuss the major changes that occurred over the years.
Builds Showcased:
2332.2 (Pre-Beta)
2348 (Pre-Beta)
2452 (Beta 2)
2525.6 (RC 1)
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#MichaelMJD #WindowsMe #Development

[@MichaelMJD]

It's time to take a look at the development process behind Windows Me. Just how bad was it? Huge thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this episode! The first 1,000 people to sign up using my link will get 2 months of Skillshare Premium for FREE! skl.sh/michaelmjd7

[@elphive42]

Michael MJD I don’t think of Windows Me as the worst version. I think that honor goes to Vista by far.

[@alexpiggy]

wait why is this comment so recent

[@TruztNoI]

Best windows Me for me run well back then still running well today...

[@NoOne-nj4uf]

MJD: Smallest thanks to Microsoft for creating Windows

[@todor2270]

Michael,you should try the upgrade from windows 1.0 to windows 10 on 5Dollar98PC

[@ashisharky]

ME was bad because Microsoft made last minute hardware requirement changes I think. And OEMs refused to comply. It works just fine in a vm.

[@natejennings5884]

My first desktop PC in Fall of 2000 came with Windows Me and it worked just fine. eMachines i566: Celeron 566MHz CPU, 32MB RAM, 60GB hard drive, and I installed a Nvidia Geforce 2 32MB PCI graphics card. Ran Quake 3 and Half-life great.

[@Reziac]

At the time I was the hardware dude for a big user group. And one thing I noticed with WinME is that it was really good about hardware flexibility. It could use Win95 drivers, if that's all you had. You could plop it onto a different machine and it would just re-driver itself and continue on as before. It did have a few serious issues: -- The DOS underneath had broken memory management (no high or extended memory possible, even if you used the DOS boot patch to get a real DOS boot). DPMI managers that did their own thing (like the one with DOOM) would run, but himem.sys and emm386.exe would not. -- Resource heaps ran out even faster than 9x (I suspect this was related to the absent DOS memory management), so it maxed out at 5 simultaneous apps. -- System Restore could completely mung it up. to where it couldn't even crash properly. -- Help is online only, and some were already bad links when it first retailed. However, I found that if I disabled System Restore, and applied 98Lite in default mode, WinME became extremely stable (within the limits of the resource heaps) -- in fact mine ran for a bit over _two years_ without a restart, and it did all the heavy lifting (Photoshop, playing DVDs, etc.)

[@Bowling4986]

@@Reziac Forget system restore, we need crash restore.

[@andrive]

Oh

[@introverted.magic.shifters]

The reason me was so buggy it's cuz they rushed it cuz xp was in development

[@denizo9263]

I love how you used the 5$ pc.

[@quickhatch8160]

Only the best for the windows ME

[@DigitalHandle]

Ironic...

[@weegeenumberone2]

Ironic

[@mesterak]

I used ME for a couple years and didn’t have much issues with it. Sure there might be some hiccups with drivers and some apps/games here and there but it felt like an improvement over 98 in my book.

[@samuel-wankenobi]

It’s like vista a most of upgraded pcs didn’t work to well but a new pc worked quite well

[@keithmichael112]

Same, I think windows 8 was way worse, that was a flawed design. Me could be a little flaky, but it was mostly fine

[@9852323]

@@keithmichael112 windows 8 wasn’t bad either. It was only the start menu. Install classic shell and you’re all good. Simple.

[@keithmichael112]

@@9852323 facts

[@charamellized]

@peefromtmv i mean its meant to be installed on a touch/tablet based device, so it could make sense on why the design looked like that, the only thing making it bad is that non-touch/tablet based users used it and don't like it, and also probably the removal of aeroglass idk.

[@dhunHERO]

"Windows meme" -KZbin automatic captions

[@JaredMLG]

That makes complete sense. Windows ME is a MEME at this point. I dare someone to use windows me for a year. No one probably will though because it is so bad. That it is funny. Oh wait hold on. "Windows Vista is worse" say whaaaaaa.. this comment is probably stupid but i will admit it's stupid. What i'm trying to say is OH GOD THE MEMES GOT ME. AHHHHHHHHH CYKA BLYAT

[@brandonn5091]

@@JaredMLG I actually used my windows me machine for like six months while I was waiting for new parts for my actual computer, it wasn't that badc

[@boalbads]

@@JaredMLG Meh.. id probs use it for a year IF i was able to go to XP after

[@doesntexist09]

Is it wrong? No

[@Windows-ql1mo]

@@JaredMLG wait are u russian?

[@DavidWonn]

As the OS with the distinction of quite possibly having the shortest support period from Microsoft, Windows ME had virtually no reason to exist. It was also seldom ever the optimal OS choice on any given hardware (if ever.) If you wanted stability, NT4 or 2000 were far greater. If you wanted backward compatibility with DOS, 98SE was the far better pick. A dual boot of NT4/98SE or 2000/98SE would certainly be the way to go for power users. With that said, it did introduce System Restore and other features already mentioned in the video, so it could have a niche use for a system not quite up to task to run these features offered in XP the next year. But more importantly, ME has a more optimized defrag that you can also run on Windows 95 or 98. Thankfully you don’t need to install ME for that nice 95/98 tweak! As for worst Microsoft OS overall, I’ll say MS-DOS 4.00 takes the cake. As for Windows versions, it is a tough call among ME, Vista, and 8.0, as all have superior alternatives on the hardware they’re designed for.

[@awesomereview2358]

I fail to see how windows 8 is on the worst list I know why vista is on that list its because of vista needing more advanced hardware then what oems supplied

[@nicholastrueblood8683]

8 was great once you put on classic shell. No forced updates or memory leaks there like Win 10 has

[@alexsutton85]

I remember Defrag in Win95/98 was essentially useless - it used to take forever, and constantly suffered from "Drive's contents changed...restarting", whereas in Me it just seemed to get on with it!

[@TheDemocrab]

It actually has it's place these days, grabbing a bunch of the updated files and slotting them into a Win98SE install actually can improve performance and stability quite a bit. When it came down to it, ME was pointless and basically served as a big bug fix/optimisation for 98SE (Some of which are admittedly pointless if you wanna use MS-DOS) and beta release of a few features destined for XP.

[@DavidWonn]

Before ME existed, the trick to improving the odds of a successful 95/98 defrag was to run it in safe mode. And with 95 you could press Control-Escape instead of hitting the OK button to bring up taskman and prevent explorer from launching. This would further reduce the chances of any running background application interfering with defrag. Oh, and don’t forget to disable the screen saver too! As for Windows 8.0, note that I specified the .0 to distinguish it from the improved 8.1. I agree wholeheartedly with using Classic Shell, as I do on 7 as well.

[@ManvendraSK]

Every time I see a Windows XP window, I take a walk to memory lane of my childhood in 2005 where I first used an HCL computer running a Windows XP / 98.

[@arteonyx]

i used a NEC laptop

[@bruhmoment1835]

My home PC had XP until this month. I hadn't looked at it for years, and kinda expected that someone would have been updating it some time in the past TWO DECADES. Just got it up to speed on win10.

[@BRICKGUYYY]

Windows XD

[@ManvendraSK]

@@BRICKGUYYY 😂

[@GenOner]

Windows 3.1 was my first Os , i remembering messing up the startup file and "breaking" windows, took me a few weeks to realize how to fix it thru Dos... it made me learn Dos lol, but in college i had Windows Me and it was fine honestly , it ran on a Pentium 133Mhz 128 MB of ram ( i maxed that sucker)

[@ExecooteOfficial]

Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:25 - Explanation 2:57 - Build 2332.2 3:13 - 2332.2 Features/Changes 4:44 - Build 2348 4:53 - 2348 Features/Changes 8:23 - Build 2452 8:30 - 2452 Features/Changes 10:20 - Sponsor 11:41 - Build 2525.6 11:51 - 2525.6 Features/Changes 13:30 - Conclusion 15:37 - Outro

[@thegamingchannel7110]

Thanks for stamps (being sarcastic at this point)

[@FloatSamplesGT710]

Most valuable comment ever

[@dueeek]

My first PC ran XP out of the box and when i saw my neighbors' ran ME i was really jealous.... And I was the PC expert in my elementary school. Those were some really fun times hahaha

[@zank8470]

Why were you jealous of people having Windows ME? XP was way better

[@thexdude]

@@zank8470 He probably thought it looked cooler.

[@90sNath]

@@zank8470 to be fair, upon release some people referred to it as the "Fisher-Price Windows" so I wouldn't be surprised if the dude saw the visual design of ME and thought it looked cooler without realizing how the OS actually performed

[@fredd12356]

@@zank8470 Maybe their PCs struggled to run XP because XP was much more demanding than any other Windows versions at that time.

[@realslimsh8y]

​@@90sNathhe would be happy when he discovers clasisc theme

[@stevec00ps]

I love WinMe - its unreliability pushed me to Windows 2000 where I never looked back :)

[@fredd12356]

Then Microsoft was immensely successful in this regard - pushing users forward to the NT kernel and away from the stale DOS kernel!

[@procta2343]

@@fredd12356 My microsoft lecture stated that it was just knocked up so there was something out there until windows XP was ready.

[@MCAlexisYT]

Since Windows Millennium Edition (ME) is DOS based, if you type “c:\con\con\”, it will show up a BSoD just like Windows 95/98.

[@_.themariodude]

Cool!

[@IkarusKommt]

Do you realize that it is the VMM showing that screen, which is a 32-bit protected mode app and has nothing to do with DOS?

[@brutpenta]

It's an easter egg.

[@silversheep4605]

Windows ME had that for about 20 years since it’s release

[@vascomanteigas9433]

Windows 3.11, 95, 98 and Me VMM are a kind of DOS extenders, since it extends the DOS kernel with a 32-bit program that wraps over DOS or talks directly to hardware.

[@JaMarrChasenumber1]

I remember loving Windows ME. I had a computer that came preinstalled with it 20 years ago and never had any real complaints with it. I continued loving it after XP came out and it took some time before I came to prefer XP over ME.

[@OldUKAds]

I even went back to Me as I didn't like XP at first!

[@TheCD5150]

@@OldUKAds Windows XP RTM and SP1 was truely awful. My father had this issue when if Media Player and Word 2000 were open at the same time in no specific order, the system would lock up (hard freeze) requiring the system to be unplugged from the wall and plugged back in. It was so bad that he went back the Windows 2000. Windows 2000 was superior to XP in many ways.

[@danhaim769]

I never bothered with ME, instead, around 2001 I upgraded to Windows 2000 instead. There were two huge problems with ME: First was the removal of DOS mode - back then I used to play a lot of DOS games, which just didn't run well (or at all) on Windows, so rebooting to DOS was something I did really often. Second thing was drivers - Not all peripherals had drivers and sometimes people had to install Windows 98 drivers instead, which very often led to crashes. Windows ME was known for being really unstable and while it may not have been inherently that way, the fact that virtually everyone had to install partially incompatible drivers made it that way. Besides, Windows 98 was still supported through Windows Update and just worked, there was no software that required ME, so there was really no reason to upgrade. At that point at work we used Windows 2000 and I was impressed with how rock-solid stable it was - mind that Windows 9x had no memory protections and that programs that misbehaved and crashed often took the entire system with them. At that point I've decided that if I'm going to upgrade then I might as well upgrade to an OS that offers real stability. For a while I had a dual boot system of Windows 2000 and Windows 98, which I used only for DOS, until a couple of years late I found DOSBox and got rid of 9x altogether.

[@ukeyaoitrash2618]

I used it for years without many problems for gaming and everything else on a 128mb ram 400 mhz pentium 2 with a 8 mb ati rage pro when i was younger 🤭

[@GdotWdot]

Wish I could say the same. Many times video driver crashes irrepairably corrupted system files related to DirectX, and forced me to reinstall. System restore was garbage since it just ate all disk space and never even worked for me once when I needed it. When it worked, it worked better than 98, it just crapped itself really hard when it did.

[@ukeyaoitrash2618]

@@GdotWdot Hmmm I never had many issues, I even found out I had a 3d accelerated card by installing opengl drivers on the quake 2 cd, and suddenly my video adapter changed from a ati rage all in wonder to an ati rage pro in windows and I had directx and opengl and could play many more games suddenly that obviously wouldnt work before, like star trek voyager elite force for example (which was/is AWESOME!)

[@GdotWdot]

@@ukeyaoitrash2618 Oh, that's a nice story. Well, I think if you happened to have a hardware setup that it liked, you were golden. But it really didn't like certain low quality components. And in my case there's also a conspiracy theory, namely I live in a poor-ish country, and hold a belief electronics sold locally have always been QA duds that wouldn't sell elsewhere. That's why I believe we had had so many problems, whereas others didn't and people on the internet now often don't. KZbinrs use systems that have survived 20+ years, so certainly these must be decent on survivorship bias alone.

[@somerandomdude9088]

Same for me. Used it in my packard bell with similar specs as yours. The Ati video chip was embedded on the mb but same processor. Did do quite a few reinstall but it worked so much better for games and stuff than 98 SE that i didnt mind. ah nostalgia...

[@ukeyaoitrash2618]

@Adoki Because pc games where my life? They still kinda are, but now its only 20%, and 20% youtube and internet, and 50-60% manga, anime, BL most of all

[@TugAndThugComputing]

I watch this on my TV especially the 98pc vids and I leave it up on in the background and watch it for like 5 hours and its soo relaxing and entertaining videos.

[@namakudamono]

Arriving at university, back in the day, I proudly boasted to folks in my halls that my PC was running the latest version of Windows - Windows Millennium. One of the techie girls mentioned that her PC was running Windows 2000, and I attempted to correct her saying “Don’t you mean Millennium?”, before she explained the differences between the two. Suffice it to say, I had Win2k installed on my PC by the end of the week.

[@FreedomRebellion1312]

I used ME without so many problems and liked it so much that I never used 2000. I made the step from ME to XP directly. However I was a kid that used it mostly for Office, Photoshop, and simple games, so probably hadn't much troubles because of that.

[@zoependoedewijwa]

My dad bought a OEM pc with Microsoft Windows Me preinstalled on the harddrive in November 2000... Never ever had problems with the system, nor the operating system... Till this day i install Windows Me in Virtual Box when i want to play some dos games (not needed but hey its how i remember playing them in 2000).

[@saruarchive6285]

Windows Me was the first OS I remember using (my dad's laptop, actually) and we never had any issues. I mostly used it for edutainment, disney games and 1.0 internet browsing The laptop itself still works, though with a very light 7 installation (it takes 10 minutes to open MS Word). My dad refuses to reinstall Me...

[@saruarchive6285]

@@williamkenzie6259 Eh, I'll try, but he has no use for the laptop anymore. Only used it when his vista laptop (my dad has always used questionable OS) exploded after years of use and needed a backup for work I personally want a win9x laptop for old games, so linux is a no for me

[@deltaoscaruniform1316]

Get some new ram for it (ıt should be cheap since it's probably pre ddr3) and a small wd blue SSD and voila. You have a decentish back up laptop. Maybe it's cpu is socket and thus changeable too? You also should open it up and clean it. Dust makes cpu slower since it makes pc be slower. Due to heat build up. Also try Linux mint xfce Also you can dosbox in Linux. Maybe buy the games from gog good old games install and then copy game files to laptop and then dosbox them.

[@vMLK02]

At 100k you should make a MichaelMJD retrospective

[@morganrussman]

:)

[@emirvmendoza]

He did one already. Title is "One Decade on KZbin - The History of Michael MJD".

[@sonic2000gr]

I still have that exact "promotional step-up" boxed Windows Me. Purchased on the day of release. I've used Me on my then HP Omnibook laptop (upgraded from Windows 98). It did have some problems but overall I liked it. I remember trying System Restore once (before actually reinstalling...) and it was running for hours before it told me "it could not restore my system" (MS later released a fix for it). As for the removal of real mode DOS, it was more of a gimmick than a reality. You could edit a file (and some steps that I don't remember any more) and get it back. Although you're right, MS was probably preparing the general public for the OS to come after Me... I was already a Windows 2000 user on the desktop back then and when I sold my Omnibook I never used Me again.

[@linux_doggo]

I always thought Windows ME was rather attractive, marketing wise. I liked all the promotional artwork and the little visuals in the explorer windows, definitely more visually appealing than windows 2000, despite 9x releases all kind of looking the same. If I need a windows 9x VM I'll almost without hesitation use ME, just because I like how it looks

[@wuukaa9079]

Protogen

[@linux_doggo]

@@wuukaa9079 puro

[@CatsRobloxOther2nd]

​@@linux_doggofurry

[@sburton015]

I remember when I built my first gaming PC in early 2001 with a 1.0 GHz Pentium III and 256 mb ram. I originally had Windows ME on it that I used throughout 2001 on that PC, I then later upgraded it to Windows XP in 2002. I don't think Windows ME really have me much problems, however Windows XP seemed to run much more smoothly.

[@benkleinberg97]

Up next: Upgrading through every Windows ME build on the $5 Windows 98 PC. And I just realized that the article at 13:31 was published on my third birthday. Makes me feel old.

[@BilisNegra]

If it's going to be as unsuccessful as similar upgrade videos of late, I'm not sure it'll be an enjoyable experience, just saying...

[@fernandoargueta4264]

One day after My first birthday

[@thomasvlaskampiii6850]

Hey birthday twin! That article was published on my 12th birthday. Who's feeling old now?

[@SnipE_mS]

You’re doing gods work here Michael. These videos are so interesting. I’ve always wanted to know how they made these.

[@saransds0082]

Windows ME was actually a nice OS. It brough native USB, ZIP Folder Support and also improved features System wide. It also had IE 5.5 (The best browser ever made in the 90s until IE 6 ruined everything), introduced movie maker, system restore, internet games, etc. The only problems were lack of Driver support on older PCs, people's mistakes (trying to install ME on 386/486 PCs, bunch of bugs/issues and mainly rumours. All of these also happened to Windows Vista also and Microsoft demonstrated it through Mojave Experiment in 2008.

[@cloverlief]

I remember Windows 2000 was supposed to be a consumer and business OS. As it neared completion a few major problems were deemed unresolvable in time. DirectX would not work with it. After much discussion it was deemed best to make a consumer OS based on 98 as a quick consumer OS to appease OEMs. Windows 2000 later fixed the Direct X issue that showed up on XP. The development time and planning for ME was very short, did not necessarily have a full team.

[@jbuchana]

I've used every version of DOS-based Windows from 3.0 forward and NT based from NT 4 forward and Windows ME was the least stable version of Windows I've ever used. I only used it on one machine, a Toshiba laptop I got in 2001. It crashed often. I replaced it with a dual-boot setup of XT and RedHat Linux, both were very stable on that machine and I used it for years afterward.

[@Nostalgia_Realm]

I used Windows Me for almost a decade on a low end Packard Bell PC. It had to be reinstalled plenty of times and I remember getting lots of blue screens. But it certainly served me well. Did lots of gaming on it, and watched my first few KZbin videos on it.

[@InsaneWayne355]

My experience with Me was short lived, it crashed all the time and I couldn't get working drivers ... I quickly "downgraded" to 98SE. After updating IE and WMP I had no need for Me.

[@achaycock]

A very interesting video and interesting to see the development builds. I remember ME coming out and there were a few reasons why I was not enamoured with it. The biggest reason initially was how slow ME was in comparison with 98. This was not an issue with new hardware at the time (setting aside driver issues), but rather with older systems running a Pentium MMX and 64MB of RAM for example. ME seemed heavier on those than 98 did. Secondly removing real time DOS was a real bugbear, but not because of running DOS games. Many issues with all of the 9x builds could often be related to DOS. It was very common to drop into DOS mode to fix the system - so in essence it felt like the bonnet was sealed on the cars engine bay to use a crude analogy. Which brings us to System Restore. A great idea in theory, but in practice, ME did a poor job of this. Supposing as was so very, very common back then, your new system was borked due to a virus. Like many people, you had not installed an antivirus package and yet you went on the internet. So after learning your lesson the hard way, you buy an AV and sort it out. Except the computer is still not right. You restore it then from an earlier point and that is when you discover that ME will actually restore the virus with it! It was things like this that really hurt ME. I never hated ME, but I have always found it pointless to use. Not as rebust as 2K or XP and not as backwards compatible as 95 or 98. Features implemented poorly with the really good ones easy to backport to 98. The worst OS? No. But possibly the most disappointing.

[@CheapSushi]

Windows Blue Screen. That's why they included System Restore. This was my first OS on my first PC, my dad bought me one from Gateway (OEM). I constantly had blue screens, system errors, corruption, driver hell, bugs, and had to restore frequently. All I really did was play games. And when not playing I was trouble shooting. This also felt like the most easily infectable version, with all kinds of viruses and weird crapware at the time. It's way to easy to have a "cleaner or nicer" experience when using a VM now but it really did have a bunch of problems. Like I said, lots of blue screens.

[@MikeyNL1038]

I loved Windows Me when we got it on our new family computer. The main reason it got buggy for us was because i used to mess around or delete system files or install crazy shareware and stuff like that. Every month i would use system restore to completely go back to a fresh state. I loved Me for stuff like Movie Maker and some other innovative multimedia features like being able to burn CD's.

[@THEtechknight]

Dang, I remember this. I still have my two Release Candidate CDs, and Final CD. I got them way back when in the beta program. My machine at the time ran Me ok, but the removal of the DOS mode was a huge bummer at the time period because in the home/consumer world 90% were still reliant on DOS including myself.

[@ethanrushbrook3314]

I'm LOVING all the new videos coming out recently...

[@thatcoolgamer9348]

For some reason I like windows me

[@killian66]

Your adopted no one like windows me

[@thatcoolgamer9348]

bmt79 I have no clue

[@bloxyman22]

Why would you like it?? Is it just the slightly more modern look to the ui/icons?? Because every other aspect was identical to win98, except it was crippled with fewer features and was much more unstable. Running it without rebooting it daily or several times daily would make it completely unusuable, as it had such serious memory leaks that it would refuse to open programs after a while. And then on top of that if you had a faster system, then it would even fail to shutdown the computer properly that could possible lead to data corruption.

[@ukeyaoitrash2618]

Me too 😌

[@TugAndThugComputing]

Lol in vbox I use it to.control legacy embedded hardware and its sooooo slow even with 1gb of ram and the colour mapping is crap

[@huleeyaxerssius7]

Back in 2002 i think it was, got my first computer for my 9th birthday which certainly was pretty nice to have a pc of my own, and it had windows me on it. Never gave me any troubles for the 3 or 4 years i had it, didn't use any dos-based programs or games, so it was fine for me. And nowdays, do have a decent few older pc's & laptops & have installed me onto them, though i could have put 98se on them sure, but me works just fine on them. And i wanted to put it onto them, so it is on a Dell Latitude C610 & D600, Compaq Deskpro SFF EN, Presario 1200 & 1400 laptops (the 1400 is inspired by the iBook clamshell of the time too with how it looks when you open the lid & whatnot), and a Panasonic Toughbook CF-27. So yes, people give me curry for not being the best, would have it's flaws & 98se would be better sure, but i do like me, being the OS on the first pc i owned almost 20 years ago, but is still an alright one, in my eyes & others it is.

[@carnivorebear6582]

1:16 - you've got 2332 listed twice instead of 2525 😅

[@Anth3rro]

I was about to comment about this video edition error. Glad I'm not the only one noticing it :)

[@clementpruvost8670]

Yeah.

[@gakabler]

When I initially read those build numbers on the screen I thought that they were Star Trek Star Dates!

[@ranchocommodorereef]

I never used Windows ME, but to me, it seemed like so much like an hors d'œuvres because it released 2 years after Windows 98 and only 1 year 1 month before Windows XP. The new features that Windows ME had were very much the same as in Windows XP. Windows XP first had Windows Media Player 8 (which had a shiny new interface and a couple of new features, but functionally was not too different from WMP 7) and Windows Movie Maker 1.1 (which was just a minor update to Windows ME's movie maker). Of course, Windows XP also had System Restore. Windows Media Player 9 and Windows Movie Maker 2 had many advanced new features than their predecessors and they released as an optional and free download for Windows XP users in January 2003, but soon became the default versions for Windows XP Service Pack 2 and 3.

Hi Michael. Love the video, I have an Idea. How about a development history video for Linux distributions, possibly starting with Debian and then Ubuntu perhaps. I would love to see that.

[@ebridgewater]

Noooo, he's doing BeOS next!

[@jbuchana]

I'd start with SLS (Soft Landing System) Linux and then Slackware Linux. Both very early, Slackware survived, SLS didn't...

[@daemonspudguy]

@@jbuchana Slackware is SLS.

[@jbuchana]

@@daemonspudguy SLS was just (very just) prior to Slackware.

[@Kinkajou1015]

I had gotten a computer as a gift from my dad back in like 2000 or 2001, it had 98SE on it. It was... fine, until it started crashing constantly. My mom's boyfriend gave me a boxed non upgrade copy of ME that he got from work for no cost. I wiped my drive and put ME on the machine and it ran beautifully up until late 2004 and I let a friend use the machine, at which point performance tanked. I was able to get rid of the malicious files he plomped on the machine, and was able to keep using it till about 2007/2008 when I finally got a new computer. I loved ME, I also loved Vista. The issue with 98SE BTW was something was causing files to be put in a temp directory on every shut down/start up and not clear them out, so my 20 GB or whatever drive was slowly getting eaten up by these files. Once they reached a critical mass it started causing actual system performance issues. Issues I no longer had on ME.

[@tristankordek]

Great material, as well as others that I saw on your channel. Windows Me has gained notoriety for a reason, in the movie you mentioned that it introduced the system restore function, but in my experience as a computer service technician it was the first option that we turned off after installing the system due to the fact that it took up a lot of disk space which was quite small in Back then, this feature was not secured in any way and almost all viruses started to use it as simple ways to infect all important files during system recovery. Another problem was that the system was so unstable that it was rarely possible to install it without a dozen reboots or removing expansion cards. With time, we developed a patent and used the Windows Me installer as a kind of system compatibility detector with the hardware installed in the computer. And so, if the installation was perfect, we could be sure that the system would work properly, but if there was even one problem, we knew that no matter how much time we spent on patches or other drivers, the system would remain unstable and we would immediately format the disk and put 98SE or 2000.

[@controlport2]

It was a really a BLESSING for our company. Many colleagues played around with their PCs, having me set the computers up again and again. Because there was no system restore yet and it was easy to make W98 crash... Very often one could not get rid of the errors, leaving me to do a new installation.... again!... Win Me saved us many times as I just could use the system restore, which, in most cases, made the system stable again. I for myself can't tell why Me was called that bad. I only see advantages compared to W98. And after all, it just WAS W98 - with some extras. I even did not miss the booting to DOS: I used DOS-bootdisks in W98 already before, as you never got that free amount of memory from inside Windows compared to booting a pure DOS disk for games. Me - the best W9x version for me. :)

[@gavin4420]

Wait, if Windows ME is bad, are we bad too? After all, it’s “me”.

[@chronon8782]

funny

[@riko_z9962]

ok

[@gavin4420]

Jdrocco I believe it’s actually homo sapiens sapiens.

[@andrive]

No my brain stop

[@NopWorks]

@A guy made to trigger you Yes. We must kill all humans.

[@netsendjoe]

I used Windows ME for a few months when my dad bought it for his computer. I wasn't truly impressed by it after upgrading from 98SE and soon after went onto Windows 2000. After using Windows 2000 for a few months and hearing about beta versions of Windows XP, I became excited about installing those early beta versions and began doing so nearly every two weeks. I was thrilled to learn about advancements in the software technology at the time and felt like running these beta versions was actually better than using the retail options at the time. I'd also like to note that Windows Neptune was in itself a pretty decent Windows version that combined elements of WIndows ME with Windows 2000 and felt pretty stable.

[@SilverSpoon_]

For years even if i've seen a Pc running Windows ME, i upgraded it to Windows 2000. Generally took about 45 minutes and windows takes care of not losing a single program or document.

[@MrNside]

I had no issue with WinMe. For all intents and purposes, it was the same as Win98SE to me. I wouldn't have purposely updated from 98SE to it, but if it came pre-loaded on a machine (like it did in my case) it's not worth installing 98SE in it's place. I was also using Win2K at the time, and it had it's issues as well. Both were good "beta" tests to merge into WinXP though.

[@rougenaxela]

I never had Windows ME myself, but everyone I knew who had it when it first came out had so many stability issues with it. Maybe a lot of bad drivers for it when it first came out? Might depend what hardware you were using.

[@andreaiannotti487]

USA: Windows ME Stalin: Windows US

[@germany1809]

China: Wongdows

[@ananttiwari1337]

@@germany1809 Wingzhou Mei

[@ilyax21]

Note True= Stalin: Windows USSR Edit

[@DrLudwigTheMedic]

@@germany1809 michaelsoft binbows

[@hahahhaha8146]

i actually laughed at that one lmao

[@muhammedfaraaz1525]

Windows me was my main pc till 2006 when I upgraded my pc to XP . I loved using it. I don't think it deserves all the hate it got. If they introduced the activity centre in the final release maybe then people would forget the faults of not having to reboot in dos mode and remember the OS for bringing in more futuristic things to the table that could help getting tasks done easier

[@kohl1999]

Great video! Windows ME was the only version of Windows I ever skipped over entirely. I can't remember exactly why but I think I had heard the bad word of mouth and stuck with Windows 98 SE right up until XP came out. Win98 was fairly stable at that point and had great driver support, etc.

[@BharadwajPEinst]

I used Windows Me for a long time. It ran great (apart from some rare system hangs)

[@alexclaudiu2003]

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.

[@stanguay169]

I was one of the many beta tester for Me and nobody from MS listened in the forums, loads of bugs and then BOOM, gold release... Wait what?

[@MegaManNeo]

Any interesting inside stories related to that?

[@supergeekjay]

@@MegaManNeo Probably stil under NDA haha "You must NOT disclose how incompetent we were" O.O

[@wishusknight3009]

Also known as Windows Mellon. I skipped it myself and went to 2000, but I set my dad's PC up with it and it really did work quite well for him. He only used email and the occasional web search for music artist lists and for storing MP3's to play over his stereo. So it saw very little use outside that.

[@einsteinx2]

I remember downloading the Windows ME beta builds from IRC back then, seemed like someone inside Microsoft was leaking them because there seemed to be updated builds like every week. I remember thinking how cool it was to try out a new Windows OS early, but of course it was still Windows ME... At least then I could attribute the instability and crashes to it being in beta lol

[@hashtagtechnerd8587]

I started my computing journey with this OS in 2000...and to be honest I had a bitter sweet experience. With a Pentium III, 128MB RAM, Intel graphics and a 40GB HDD. Yea it gave me problems but it was good learning experience. Feeling nostalgic by just seeing the logo and the startup sounds! RIP Windows ME.

[@NeonzGamingYT]

Nice content! I like it. I download every single of windows development video of yours. Keep doing it!

[@TheEvox81]

Nothing says "I love your content and support you" like announcing to the world "I steal your content".

[@NeonzGamingYT]

@@TheEvox81 i download his video so that i can watch in offline mode bruh

[@tommasopetrella4856]

I had absolutely no problems with Windows ME. I always liked it because it had far more drivers that would automatically install, much more polished look, and USB was far more effective. Plus I think it was a very nice looking operating systems with some new features that were new and fresh. At the time I owned a computer repair shop and it was so much easier installing ME on systems that some of the drivers were difficult to find with other OS's such as 98SE. All in all I always found it stable and effective. The only thing I disliked was no DOS support, or at least mild support, but at the time DOS was nearly dead anyways. I must say I have always found the OS a breath of fresh air which allowed us to see what was coming, kind of a sneak peak of the future of operating systems. It was very modern for its time and I think 98SE was so well received that Windiows ME just was different, and people were so happy with 98 and its DOS support, it clouded peoples judgment. I still have a computer with ME, but now just for fun. I highly recommend installing ME to see what I mean if you were unfortunate enough to never use it in the past.

[@georgeh6856]

I find it hard to believe this much development effort went into ME when it was so unstable. It felt like ME was just thrown together at the last minute with little regard to whether it actually worked.

[@procta2343]

it was just a quick stop gap until windows XP was completed.

[@georgeh6856]

@@procta2343 At the customers' expense.

[@RoterFruchtZwerg]

I've used ME a long time and had no issues. It was way better than SE. It was overall faster, had better native USB Support, came with lots of drivers, had support for zip if I recall right, etc. And Boot-Time was about 30s compared to 3min with 98SE on my Pentium II back then.

[@alcid34]

Unfortunate that Windows ME was the very first OS I ever touched in my life.

[@d4wnnnn]

Sad mine was xp at 5 yrs old

[@captainpattreacts]

Mine was windows 3.1

[@CrazyFireBeatz]

Mine was windows 7

[@2lexander]

Mine was win98 at 2 years old

[@silvanpaul2531]

Same here, so this is a bit nostalgic to me

[@gmt-yt]

My office had an Me box for art stuff with a touch screen and a stylus. It had runs of stability punctuated by occasional trouble like any Windows box kept up-to-date. I think a lot of the bugs actually came down to the system checkpoint/restore crap. Frankly it's a terrible idea to randomly try installing old drivers every time there is any sort of error condition. Windows still does this today and it still causes problems. My favorite thing about that Me box was the incredibly low input latency, it was snappy af!

[@MatiEP09]

Me: makes videos in Final Cut Pro. Scool: today i will Teach you about adding title to your movie in Windows movie maker.

[@smpark12]

Yep pretty much

[@CornholioDK]

The OS was just to unstable, it frooze and crashed way to much, I personally installed Windows 2000 which was solid as a rock.

[@Kacpa2]

Some enforcement is good if its genuinely a good change, but removal of audio jack on iphone(and many android phones following its steps) is just idiotic and leads to no benefit of any kind. Even if someone uses wireless headphones option to use them or aux connectio cable(for car audio or audio setups at home) is just lost for no good reason.

[@ialien2655]

I remember Windows ME hanging all the time, when trying to open Internet Explorer 5.5, BOOM hang, when opening Documents, BOOM, hang. It was literally so bad at handling multi tasking, sometimes it would just BSOD while you just stared at it.

[@jargon343]

Thanks Michael!

[@domxem5551]

I bought a cheap no name laptop in 2003 that came with no OS installed. I decided to buy Win ME for it (because of the cost) and it gave me so many problems that soon after I decided to buy XP (home edition, also because of the price). Years later I installed that ME in a virtual machine and broke the boot to ms-dos limitation, so I could work on assembly programming. Those good old days

[@insoft_uk]

Windows Me was perfectly fine and what I found so amusing at the times I hear people talk about Windows 2000 as it was the next Windows 98 and they don’t like NT yet Windows 2000 was NT tho they thought it was Windows

[@bloxyman22]

I really kind of disagree. I have experienced WinME on many different computers and they all had the same exact issues. One of the issues was that it was generally more unstable than win98, which is bad enough on it's own. But there was also more issues like what seemed like some kind of memory leak. If you did not reboot the system dialy, it would soon refuse to open programs with an error message saying it was out of system resources, and if you looked at the about windows popup you could see the system resources going down over time. When it came to boot times it did indeed boot a little faster on a fresh install, but after running it for a few months it would actually boot slower than a similar win98 installation.

[@BamonBoy]

Everytime I boot Windows ME, I get Blue Screens before bootup!

[@jonas9]

Not Windows' fault

[@nicholastrueblood8683]

I know your a real me user.

[@BilisNegra]

I bet you get one even with the PC unplugged

[@hmwndp]

@@BilisNegra i bet you get one even with the pc not existing

[@otherssingpuree1779]

It is weird how for 7 years (2001-8), windows 2000 worked perfectly. The only time I saw bsod was when I was trying to run a pirated virus laden disc of gta vice city. While ME would crash often, most of my friends went back to 98 or upgraded to xp.

[@jackintosh27]

My father had a Windows 98 pc (similar to yours) which he updated to Windows Me. There were always errors or bsods. I remember that playing Superbike 2001 almost always after half an hour the system gave errors and After that there were a bsod. Every time. For desperation we went back to 98 SE and everything was stable again. I actually don't know if the italian version (yes, I'm italian) have more problems than the english one, but I think they are the same. Use the computer was a HELL

[@MikeHoulden]

My experience with windows ME was easy and good.I managed to run it on my first computer build

[@alexmihai22]

I remember when a neighbor installed Windows Me on my Pentium 2 400MHz and ran slower than Windows 98 SE. I asked him to install back the Windows 98 SE, and I used it for the next 2 years. I had 128MB of RAM, which was pretty fine for a Pentium 2. Still, Windows Me had a bit higher requirements than Windows 98 SE and didn't run as smooth. I upgraded lately to Athlon 2000+ and 4 months later to Barthon 2600+, a CPU that I used at home for 6 years, up to 2009.

[@nuclear3011]

Maybe Windows ME betas upgrading saga on Win98 PC?

[@fangzahn]

I actually loved Windows Me. Never had any problems with it.

[@NotGodlikeWZ]

Windows 8: I am the worst system ever Windows Me: hold my blue screen

[@sriramsundar8388]

8 is better than Vista and 10 combined. Much more stable

[@idk-sy3iu]

Windows 10 is the worst

[@tech34756]

V. Sriram Sundar I think 8 would have been well received had they just left the traditional start menu as an option. Once I installed classicshell and a couple of other tweaks e.g. restore the old Solitaire app, I was generally quite happy with it.

[@idk-sy3iu]

@WindowsSonic 2007 yes it is. I hate it. It is the reason why I switched to linux

[@brlin]

Vista:

[@michaelmcdonald2348]

I bought a new PC in 2001 that came with Windows ME. All my previous PC's had been built from whatever I could get cheap. To have a brand new high spec PC was amazing. I can't say I ever had any complaints about Windows ME. Pretty much everything worked fine. I think I had an issue with AOL 6 which although pre installed wouldn't work because it wouldn't install the "AOL adapter". I managed to find a workaround after the manufacturer couldn't help. So my experience of ME is positive. I did try and install it on an older PC I had (Pentium 233MMX) and it was slower to use than 98SE, but that PC was pretty ancient by that time.

[@glowtail3744]

Windows: windows me helped make windows 2000 Everyone: unfortunately history will not remember it this way

[@drygnfyre]

Windows 2000 was based on the NT kernel. Me was based on the MS-DOS kernel. They were completely different and Windows 2000 actually was older, coming out nearly half a year earlier. 2000 was basically NT 5, while XP was NT 5.1. Whereas Me would have been more akin to something like Windows 4.2.

[@redicendia1355]

@@drygnfyre it was actually 4.9

[@jordananderson8299]

Last night I planned on installing Windows ME onto a flash drive, not hearing anything about this new video. What a coincidence. Posted the day after this was uploaded

[@fabricatedego]

Honestly, I think I'm one of the few who liked Windows ME. I remember buying the upgrade from 98. I never had a problem with the OS. I still think of it fondly and one of my retro pcs still runs it

[@BilisNegra]

I do believe you. I honestly refuse to believe it ran like shit on EVERY machine.

[@spacefightertzz]

Ya I noticed it to be faster when I switched fresh install from 98 to ME. And I liked it. I had something like a Pentium 3 900mhz, 128MB RAM, 25GB HDD, Sound Blaster 5.1 with tv-remote, something like that. A custom build, not that branding junk, was it gateway that was terrible computers...

[@fabricatedego]

@@spacefightertzz I had an AMD K62 when I ran it. No problems.

[@spacefightertzz]

oyaa AMD was the good system haha

[@fabricatedego]

@@spacefightertzz yeah. I'm still an AMD fanboy. I have an Fx Black 8300 but saving up to build a Ryzen

[@installshieldtmide2726]

Everyone: Watches MJD Videos... Me: Plays the Alarm für Cobra 11 Crash Time Soutrack

[@blainepalmerza]

Awesome video, Michael! I love your content, Michael! Remember to never give up and keep doing your passions❤

[@MichaelMJD]

Thanks so much!

[@Mr.Plant1994]

My mother had a really high end windows me put together around the year 2000 and then she used it all the way up until like 2010 and while it wasn’t perfect she loved it and I remember it fondly and don’t remember it having a lot of issues

[@subscriberswithoutvideos-vo5qo]

Windows ME was a decent os i had no problem with it

[@tristanraine]

Yay new vid! Hope its good! Will edit after watching. EDIT:Great vid and good work, still had the hardware to work with it surprisingly. Honestly it isnt THAT bad.

[@edmoran1994]

3:21 the only other one being windows 7 being the exact same

[@3DMAX.]

Say what you want about Windows Me. I liked it!

[@SluggishRain]

Me with Windows 8 and Vista:

[@JeffCD77]

I don't recall ever having any issues with Me. It ran just fine for me back in the day. It's the same with Vista. Everyone complained about that OS, but I happened to really like it. Its one of my favorite OS's believe it or not.

[@bliss788]

Windows ME isn't that terrible as people who to told me, and had no problems with Windows ME. Driver issue was present.

[@bliss788]

The specs of my pc from 1999: A Celeron (Can't remember which Celeron) 256 MB ram Some random ATI graphics card (Can't remember) It was a custom build not an OEM

[@thomasvlaskampiii6850]

When I was near the end of my Me experience, it got really buggy. And I mean REALLY buggy. Every time I tried to open anything, an error message would pop up. "An error has occurred. has caused an error in and must be shut down." To this day, I have no idea why this error message popped up or what it meant. I've looked into it and can't find an answer

[@farmervillager1376]

It could be to do with computer age.

[@thomasvlaskampiii6850]

@@farmervillager1376 At the time, the computer was 3 years old. It came new with Me

[@tiernanmccarthy]

ME is weird for me, it was my first experience with a computer. Vivid memories of some Mr Potato head point and click game and generally learning how Windows worked through the operating system. I might go install it on a virtual machine, it'll be a nice nostalgia trip.

[@OldUKAds]

I had a lot of issues with memory leakage in 98 and was frequently rebooting. I remember getting Me and it solving it. So with that very narrow recollection I have positive memories of Me.

[@daemonspudguy]

Make a Vista development redux, please. My experience with Windows Me was exclusively within VMware but it was painful. Win9x isn't known for coping well in VMWare Virtual Machines on AMD processors but this during my time with an Intel processor. VMware tools didn't even install correctly, and the mouse emulation was jittery and bad. Windows 98 SE worked flawlessly in a VM on the same system. Windows Me is not good.

[@crapcbm]

I was happy with it ... you need a lot work to setup (hardware in correct pci slot, correct driver version...) but when you had that barrier behind, it was running rock solid here.

[@Alpha-um3pt]

Thank upload i was bored. Great video even though i didnt watch it yet

[@farmervillager1376]

Did you finish watching yet?

[@Gmodfan750]

Did you finish watching yet?

[@Skatox]

It worked ok on my computer back then, it was lighter and faster than Windows 98. I don't know why many people had issues with this OS.

[@AlguienMas]

Interestingly enough,my mom had a windows me pc in the past and she didn't have any problem with it. In fact,I think windows me is her favourite version. Fast forward to 2012 or so and she got a windows 8 laptop (which was then upgraded to windows 8.1) and she also didn't have any problem with it. She even likes that version,and I also like it cuz I actually had a good experience with that version. Then that laptop was upgraded to windows 10 and now it's barely usable to completely unusable. Conclusion:windows me and windows 8/8.1 are better than windows 10...K O R N F I R M E D

[@joojoojeejee6058]

I don't remember having any particular problems with Windows Me, it was just a new version of Windows 98 basically.