Windows ME: The WORST Version of Windows Ever?!

[@danwood_uk]

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[@RhizometricReality]

😡🤬😡🤬😡🤬

[@marktaylor3727]

i had me and i had no problems with it but that was i supp-es i new how to work with it and the one thing i fond out with all windows what ever the box sed on memory double it

[@PJBonoVox]

Yeah, definitely not installing that garbage. You gotta do what you've gotta do though.

[@Dr.Mohandes]

I don't blame you for accepting it you're just a small youtuber who need money but fuck raid shadow legends i'm tired of seeing their shitty game everywhere

[@ironmaiden5658]

I used ME for a good 5 years until I jumped ship and started using XP. Pretty quickly I jumped out off that boat and used Vista for so long I can't remember. I used it for so long I skipped clean over Windows 7 and jumped onboard Windows 8. Then 8.1 and then 10.. .

[@msthalamus2172]

I worked at MSFT when Me came out. It was definitely called "me", but that was just marketing. I don't know anyone inside the company who called it anything other than Millennium. We didn't talk about much at all to be honest, though. We generally ran NT 4 and then Win2k rather than any of the 9xs.

[@Doing_Time]

duh, can you imagine the chaos if every employee had to face the blue screen of death a few times a day? I know yall popped in and ran 9x when Age of Empires came out... NT4 was rock stable if you found hardware with NT drivers. Windows 2000 was the stability of NT, with the GUI of 9x, and the terribly slow boot times of ME...and almost no manufacturers had released drivers for it when it came out and few ever did after, and I totally blame MS for that--so 2000 was great if you work for a company that orders 10,000 computers at a time and can dictate driver development--then MS cut off 2000 like a bad sore the day XP came out (in my opinion to force online activation nightmares...the medieval MS era from 2001 to 2015, when I spent my non-gaming time in Slackware)

[@msthalamus2172]

@@Doing_Time Hard to tell your tone/intent from your text, but you are right about a few things: 9x stability was part of the issue, but in our case it had far more to do with our machines having to be in a domain rather than stability. While you can join 9x boxes to domains, they lacked some of the central management features that ITG (the IT department-- the "most feared and loathed group") want to employ. NT4 was my favorite OS ever until Windows 7 came out. (Win7 still holds that title). NT4 was very stable, but lacked plug-and-play support out of the box (though you could hack it in), not to mention USB. Both of these things became very important very quickly in the time between the NT4 and W2K releases. W2K boot time was *really* *really* bad, but Me boot times IME were pretty good. MSFT did drop both Me and 2k when XP was released, but if you think about it, consumer-friendly act in itself or not, no longer bifurcating the consumer and business markets with different products was the right answer. The mistake was really in releasing Me and 2K at all, not in placing focus on XP. Also, for what it's worth, very few rank-and-file people in the company (which decidedly included me) saw online activation in any more favorable light than consumers in general. I remember raging against it at work, as unpolitic as that definitely was. (I was young, and never very good at politics.) The "medieval era" as you put it, was really the Steve Ballmer era. Let's put the blame for that time where it belongs. Everything the company did was about fulfilling Steve's edict of protecting the Office and Windows kingdoms, and several of my projects were sh--canned as a result. It's notable that the stock price was flat for his entire tenure as well. Gates was a thousand times the visionary Ballmer ever was, and Nadella a thousand times the business man. (Sorry Steve!)

[@msthalamus2172]

And Jobs was a million times the visionary Gates was, and Woz a billion times the engineer of all four of these other names-- combined! :D

[@Doing_Time]

​@@msthalamus2172 I agree with almost all of that...NT4 was there for me as long as all I wanted to do was code or type documents...multimedia in general and directx specifically was pathetic. 2000 was my favorite of all time (until windows 8/.1/10), but I grew to resent how MS made a mockery of those of us who bought 5 copies of 2000 pro the day it came out and then left us in the dust. XP fixed the boot times, but other than being better/longer supported I thought it was just a lot of eye candy additions. Vista introduced slow computing the likes of which hadn't been seen since floppy booting. They did fix the uac and validation issues a little bit by the last service pack, they refer to it as Windows 7. I can't say enough glowing things about directx, multimedia playback, virtualization, and driver support in windows 10...and I've only seen blue screens when hardware actually failed. I've changed out motherboards, GPUs, memory, etc. without any need to validate windows messages (in the medieval era, I actually had to re-validate for things like a USB wifi adapters and once a game pad...and online validation didn't always work so I'm on the phone to MS at 3am in the morning talking to someone about why I should be validated (eventually they got smart and automated the phone validation))

[@Doing_Time]

@@msthalamus2172 oops, didn't see your second comment until now. Well, the apple guys certainly liked to party... More of an Amiga man myself--how could stupid commodore screw that up? Ahh well, I prefer blackberries too... often the best products fail because it's all about image=Apple. I programmed an Apple IIe for a week and have never again been tempted to touch another Apple product...no backspace!?!?! I have to retype the entire line of code to get back to the typo!?!?! Ahhhhhh

[@algiefeatherstonehaugh1091]

You were lucky - in 2000 I spent two whole days trying to get that abortion to install before giving up completely.

[@CommodoreFan64]

Yep same, my girlfriend during that time in 03 had an HP that came preinstalled with ME, and was always having trouble it. after the 4th time doing a fresh install, I just went back to Windows 98 SE, and called it a day till I upgraded her to a newer machine I built myself with Windows XP on it.

[@robertosswald5896]

Same here. Back in 2000 I've Installed it a couple of times in 2 days, and ended up restoring "ghosted" win98se back. I guess it depended on hardware. At that time I've had Celeron @400-500MHz and 64MB of RAM. The machine in this video is way more powerful than that, and I had about whart was a mid-range for that time... So maybe it just worked better on newer and better hardware.

[@CommodoreFan64]

@@robertosswald5896 Yes that was about mid range for sure, and it was not only the higher hardware needed to run ME proper, but the lack of ME drivers for the hardware, and people want to say well that was not MS fault, but in a way it was because MS was still using the 9X kernel, and failed to make ME fully compatible with 98/SE drivers of which most hardware up to that point had drivers for. MS was just a cluster F all around for so many.

[@robertosswald5896]

@@CommodoreFan64 Exactly. Could be that Dan had luck with the fact that he had all the right drivers and powerful hardware so that's why it worked for him (the advantages of hindsight :) ).

[@YAUUN]

I just pirated Windows 2000

[@jthorpe4droid]

I remember buying a windows me PC from Tesco, it came with my first LCD screen too. Didn't have that many issues with mine compare to the day I got a vista laptop!

[@richhenry8004]

Early Win95 and Win98 were both as quick to crash as a WinME upgrade. It is the lack of MSDOS support that really made it as unpopular as it was.

[@gameguy73]

The win 9.x line wasn't really based on DOS. It actually had it's own 32 bit kernel. It used DOS as a bootloader and then DOS handed over control to the 9.x kernal. DOS was kept running on the side for backwards compatbility. Which in some ways makes it a hybrid OS, but it's not like the first three versions of windows.

[@CoolDudeClem]

Windows ME was so bad that it glitched out so much that I thought that _I_ was doing something wrong! I thought I was just really bad at computers and was somehow inadvertently messing things up.

[@ugh.idontwanna]

I've always suspected ME's reputation for being unstable being down to drivers. Drivers were something that came on a floppy or CD when you bought something. You had to be an enthusiast back then to even consider updating a driver from the net. That would explain why people who checks it out nowadays don't see the same issues. They'll usually get the latest compatible drivers,

[@mikeonthecomputer]

I've always thought the same. On both real hardware and VMs, I've had way more luck with Windows Me being stable than I've ever had with Windows 98 (either edition). Definitely my preferred way to run Win9x things.

[@OmkarKavitkar-ig2wk]

My parents bought it for me when I was child in 2000. Still was better than 98 at least when it came to play games

[@ji-wonseong1623]

I can confirm. If you tried running Windows 98SE and ME on a WDM-only driver setup, Windows ME will win. 98SE is just ultra buggy with WDMs.

[@sburton015]

It's funny thinking about it. When I was in college in 2003. I was in a class where we were studying different operating systems and the professor said "Now there's Windows 3.x, Windows 95, 98, 98se, NT, Windows 2000, and Windows XP, and there was also a project called Longhorn". Then I raised my hand and asked him, "Well, what about ME, Windows ME?". Then he responded by saying "Oh don't even mention that, I don't want to hear about Windows ME".

[@paddycoleman1472]

Wish we could go back to the 3D look of previous Windows versions. Windows 10 is soulless.

[@Tall_Order]

>Quote "That image of ME being the worst version only came along in recent years". For me it actually was the worst version. We have satirical memes like "your mouse cursor has moved. You must restart for changes to take effect" because of it.

[@10MARC]

I agree. We were all laughing at Windows ME back in 2000, too

[@Cthulhu1970]

@@10MARC Yep, it was considered absolutely buttock-clenchingly piss poor when it was new. I tested it out a few weeks after it was released, and I reinstalled 98SE very soon afterwards. :)

[@robsku1]

Didn't remember those jokes - it does describe my (limited) experience with it though =)

[@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.

[@carsonfball4]

When ME came out, I was working in the IT department of a small college. Typically, we built the computers for all of the offices and installed the OS and software on all of them. We were given a preview copy of ME a few months before it was actually released and installed in on a computer in our office area to test it out. It would crash on us daily so we recommended against it and either installed 98SE or 2K on computers we built depending on the needs of the user. One department wanted ME and didn't like the fact that we wouldn't install it so they bought "off-the-shelf" computers that came pre-installed with ME (paying at least 25% more than IT would have charged for similar computers). After 2 weeks, they asked us to buy licenses for 98SE and install it for them since their computers were crashing constantly. Again, these were computers that came from the manufacturer with ME pre-installed, so it wasn't some issue with them not supporting ME.

[@JimboJammy]

My experience was ME was positive initially. I'd heard mixed things about it back in the day, but I had the upgrade itch. I was running some older hardware that only had driver support for 98 and ME so that ruled out 2000 for me. I grabbed myself a copy and installed it from scratch onto my pc. I was really impressed, it felt like 98 but more modern (I suppose that's exactly what it was) I spent the next week slowly painfully copying my files from CD backups over to the machine. I kid you not, a day after I'd finally got ME exactly how I wanted it with all my files restored, one day I went to start my pc and it wouldn't boot. Would just bluescreen. I did nothing unusual the day before, shut it down as I would any other time but it never booted again. No idea why. Went back to 98 and stayed with 98 until xp came out and upgraded from 98 to xp. Never looked back. So although I want to stick up for ME, because while it worked, it was great, I can't because it decided to seemingly implode for no reason I'm aware of.

[@taragwendolyn]

It was ok with WHQL-signed drivers, but they made it too easy to install non-signed drivers, and the process to get WHQL certification too ornery. Because it was running drivers in Ring 0, it meant that a bad driver would cause a blue screen, and a whole lot of hardware manufacturers put out half-assed drivers. Sadly, XP still had the ability to be brought down by a bad driver, but they made it a lot harder to install non-signed drivers: wasn't until Vista that they introduced the ability to gracefully recover from a driver crash without bringing down the whole system. (I say this having switched to Windows 2000 the day they released SP4 with DirectX support...)

[@MikeDragon]

Honestly, I like Windows ME, always have. Part of it might be at least in part, mostly the nostalgia factor since Windows ME was the very first Windows I ever used when my dad bought our very first PC back in 2000 (a Metron PC, powered by a 566MHz Celeron and 32 MB of SDRAM and a 6.5GB hard drive. I still have that machine and it still works), but truth is... We never had issues with ME for as long as we had it on our PC. We'd browse the web, make documents on Word, I'd play my games, etc. It always worked fine and quick. Maybe we were some of the "lucky ones" or just coincidence, but maybe there might be something to that theory that upgrading from 98 could have something to do with it, as ours was a native install. Regardless, despite all the hate it gets and recognizing that it does have flaws, Windows ME still has a place in my heart.

[@codeman99-dev]

Odd... you never mentioned that Microsoft officially back-ported features to Windows 98 SE. Which effectively made ME pointless, not once (XP), but twice.

[@umageddon]

I used ME for awhile before XP and never had any real issues that I can remember... maybe ATI driver issues?

[@SeñorDossierOficial]

It had some issues with certain drivers, but the OS itself wasn't that bad and many users would have a nice experience

[@CommodoreFan64]

The problem was ME came on a lot of very low end prebuilt machines, and they often did not bother to make ME specific device drivers for them, thus forcing Win 98/SE drivers to run under ME, which tended to cause all kind of problems, then the fact many of them did not come with enough ram to run ME proper. eMachines was one of the worst companies about doing this back in the day.

[@0311Mushroom]

The issue here is that the hardware makers should be making the drivers. No OS should expect to need to do that. Most instabilities were driver related. That is not the fault of the OS.

[@CommodoreFan64]

@@0311Mushroom That is true, but in the case of ME, when the hardware you had did not have proper drivers, and it kept having issues it did make the OS unusable, so many times when I had to fix computers for others, and I knew there was Win 98SE drivers I just went back the 98SE, and called it day well at least before XP came out, and got out of it's early days.

[@0311Mushroom]

@@CommodoreFan64 once again, the fault with the hardware makers, not the OS itself.

[@atornblad]

I actually had no problems with Windows Me. I installed it on my parents' home computers, because it had System Restore and System File Protection, so that when things got messed up, I could help them get back to a working state quickly.

[@richardfld]

same!

[@Samorutt1324]

Lucky you!!!! I have never had windows 2000 or me because I literally didn't exist. My first windows was 7 but I have heard horror stories of it online.

[@Alexlfm]

@@Samorutt1324Honestly they’re overblown. I’m sure part of the problem is it was so short lived. People forget that Win98 was a steaming pile when it came out. There’s a reason everyone uses 98 SECOND edition. That thing crashed just sitting at the desktop.

[@cowboyfrankspersonalvideos8869]

When Windows ME came out, I purchased a new Dell notebook which came with ME. I plugged it into my home network, which by that time had about 8 or 9 computers on it. The notebook which was a fairly high end machine for the time, was so slow it took almost 2 minutes to open a one page MS Word document. After fighting with it for several days I discovered the issue. ME was trying to index everything on my network, which would have been somewhere around 500 gigabytes at that time. Once I figured how to turn off indexing, which was on by default, the problem went away. Shortly thereafter, I deleted ME and bought a copy of 98 for that machine.

[@MattRoseBoswall]

I remember that in about 2006, I tried to make a networked file server using an old PC and Windows ME. I think it lasted about 3 weeks before it refused to boot - and then I installed Linux and it ran for 3 years!

[@NhoyBarangay]

I have never experienced disappointment from Windows Me coming from Windows 95. Played games and installed all my hardware drivers just fine. It’s a nice upgrade back then before upgrading to Windows Xp. I will never know why some nerds keeps whining about it since I skipped and never experienced 98 and 2K.

[@MegaManNeo]

I have never really used Me as I jumped from a 98 PC straight to XP (which actually started in school for me) but I bought the installation discs from an earlier colleague of mine years ago so that I would have it in my collection. Back then mom got me a computer book with lots of pictures of PCs, operating systems and other stuff in it, looking at Me always made me think how cool it looks.

[@meetoo594]

Raid shadow legends, oh dear. Horrible predatory game thats designed around conning players into spending real money. Its barely a game, more a flashy slot machine. I guess Dan needs to pay bills but there must be a better and more relevant sponsor than that crap.

[@retroandgaming]

Yeah, upgraded from 98 to ME and back to 98 the next day. And it was because of random crashes. The driver support was terrible at launch...

[@almurray2000]

“My very good friends at...” makes me cringe. Unless you can post a photo of you sharing a social experience with the staff at xyz sponsor then please leave that line out.

[@markusjuenemann]

Thanks for saying what I thought. It's absolute ok, if you get money from your sponsors. But just be honest about it. This whole "friends" thing with youtube sponsors is awful. He's certainly not the only Yotuber, who does it like that. I was about to stop the video and unsubscribe. Maybe i will next time.

[@stephaniedibello2150]

I see nothing wrong with it.

[@jj_and_the_jaysjays6316]

I think the main issue with Windows ME is that it wasn't a Service Pack for 98, you had to pay for a new version. I actually preferred it to 98SE and 2K. XP obviously much better but I hated Windows 8 and would have preferred ME to Windows 8 any day. Thanks for the review Dan its a good nostalgic trip to that time.

[@AlidarJarok1]

I went from Windows 7 to 10. How bad was 8?

[@Quantum_Prophet42]

I skipped Windows ME back in the day and went from 95 to XP. I've actually only used Windows ME in a virtual machine. Never had any issues with it, but not really disappointed that I passed this version by and went to XP. Windows XP is my 2nd favorite operating system after Windows 7.

[@traviscombs6947]

I remember my grandma had an HP computer that came with Windows Me on it that I would use whenever I went to her house. I don't really remember it being as problematic as everyone says. Years later she bought another HP and that one had Vista on it. It was in the really early days of Vista, and it was 64-bit at that. THAT computer was a nightmare.

[@SomeOldGamers]

She probably made the mistake of buying one of those NetBust Celerons which were terrible and didn''t even run XP properly. I ran vista on a Core 2 Duo for 5 years and it was fine. Core 2 is the same basic architecture still used in intel CPUs today so Core 2 Duos and Quads still work pretty well for a basic Windows 10 PC even in 2022. Just don't expect to do much current gaming with them, though a Quad will run fortnite ok with a discrete GPU. Vista and 7 were/are great because you can run most XP era games and even a lot of Win95/98 games on them and you can't on any later version of Windows. I still have a PC running 7 for that purpose. I even ran Windows 10 on a late P4 with hyperthreading not too long ago from a SSD and it was pretty useable as long as you didn't open 6 apps and 23 browser tabs at once. But the Celerons based on them had a completely emasculated cache and would run at 100% just with light use even on XP. Basically just constantly shuffling data back and forth between cache, memory and storage because they usually had way too little of all of those.

[@Elkarlo77]

Windows Me was more the Windows 'meh' uninspiring Stuff in it. But working for the Housewife and stable. I was fixing a lot of SE Machines where the User was the Problem, not Me. Vista had the Problem of the OEM. 512MB minimum Ram 800 Mhz CPU Clock. In a time when the Athlon XP 2000+ /Celeron 2000 with 1Gig or 2 Gig was the normal PC. The OEM had forced it on Microsoft for the Netbook, and 512MB on an XP Machine was already in its way out. My experience was on release on a decent PC (Said Athlon XP 2000+ and 1.5gig Ram): A little slower thanks to the bug with the small files. Vista SP1 when i sold my then Gaming PC 2007 (Athlon XP 3200+ with 3Gig of Ram and ATI X1650XT so a upper End 2006 Gaming PC): Vista SP1 was about 30% faster than Windows XP with Barton Core Mods etc. On my C2D Vista SP1 x64 was literally running Circles around XP. Had Dual boot for about 1 Month then i threw XP away. (it helped that i had a special Asus Vista Ready Motherboard with fast Ready Boost Flash installed, it reduced the small files Problem and cutt down the Boottime to 12 Seks WITH a HDD) So for Vista: Oem minimum PC worse, as Vista used twice as much Memory and CPU Time as XP. Decent 2000 Class PC with 1-2 Gig Ram here was the point of equilibrium. Especially after SP1 A faster PC with 3Gigs of Ram and a 3000 class or better Prozessor with modern Grafikscard: 30% faster in 32bit Mode. A 64 Bit Dualcore with 4 Gig of Ram about twice as fast. But Intel was still selling the Celeron D 2ghz especially the Celeron 310 without Intel 64 till 2007 with the lackluster 910-945 Chipsets. They had so many produced that they had to pair the Atom with them, to get them sold. And Calling a Celeron 310 on a 910 Chipset a 2000 Class Prozessor would be... a exaggeration. Of course those Systems only got 512MB of Ram and Vista.

[@richardfld]

Its funny. I ran ME for a solid 3-4 years back during that time and had very few issues. Sure there was the odd driver problem and whatnot but anyone that says they never had driver issues with xp or 98 is outright lying.

[@cigmorfil4101]

4:50 PC World and Dixons in the early 2000s. Not surprising seeing as Dixons [Stores Group] bought Vision Technologies in 1993 to get its hands on PC World that Vision Technologies set up...

[@tyrgoossens]

Windows ME remains the only OS I've ever downgraded from. I'm sure it ran perfectly fine for a lot of people but on my system it didn't.

[@theredjoker17]

I think this is the proper time to let Windows Me & Vista show its full potential, I'm now getting used to Windows Vista as it was so similar with Windows 7, stability & reliability, it performs very well if your PC is configured correctly. I hope one day, the hate for Windows Vista & Me will be gone soon

[@judenihal]

People forget what they do with their computer. Video editing, multitasking, running multimedia application, rapidly relaunching applications that physically access devices. They do this and blame the OS without understanding how it works.

[@SimSimsTECHcrunch]

My dad never bothered with Windows ME. He used Windows 2000 because he's multilingual (as am I) and W2K was the first OS that allowed you to install various language packs with full compatibility for things like filenames in foreign languages without the need for a localized version designed for another region of the world with the proper codepage set up. W2K lets you get this taken care of during the install process or even afterwards.

[@mindphaserxy]

Windows MEs problem was that people tried to install it on old ass AMD K6 or Pentium MMX machines from 1996 and 1997. My wife's family had a Compaq with a Duron 800Mhz, 64MB of RAM and it was slow as hell.

[@jbuchana]

A few months before Windows XP came out, I bought a new Toshiba laptop with Windows ME. When it was running, it was just fine, but it crashed at least once a day. Shortly after this, XP came out and I had it dual-booting XP and Red Hat Linux, both were very stable and I used that laptop for years.

[@NazmusLabs]

nice

[@robintst]

I don't remember ever seeing a front facing game port on a PC back then. Something specific to eMachines?

[@ewanwood]

I did install ME back in the day on my 1999 PC - Celeron 333, Nvidia TNT, 64MB ram to see what it was all about and I never found any issues. My only problem was I was still playing DOS games like Blood, DUKE3D and even DOOM so there it was not so great. I still have that PC but now upgraded to P3 350 and 128MB of Ram and USB 2.0 card running 98SE. I think Dan after watching I might clean install ME for Windows use. I have got Windows on an SD to IDE set up as well as a mechanical HDD. I might copy DOS 7 to the HDD and use a floppy to boot to DOS for real mode for my DOS games. Can't 100% remember but if I boot to DOS from floppy it can't see the SD/IDE disk anyway. Great video as always.

[@davidcole3927]

Used Windows ME for years. I was hesitant to move to XP, and then I beta tested 7. Clean install is the key 🔑 to stability along with the latest drivers.

[@sphinx3r]

It's not true that the "Windows ME is the worst ever"-thing is just in recent years. I was very into computers at the time, and everyone hated WinME. To the extent that people showing up at LAN parties were mocked for running it, and the second they had _any_ issue with the network or connecting, the OS would be blamed.

[@xnonsuchx]

My only real experience w/ WinMe was my mom getting a Compaq Presario that I think was Celeron-based that came with Win98SE, but included a free WinMe "upgrade." When she got the upgrade CD in the mail, she went ahead and installed it and started having problems with her PC. My older brother and I were only willing to troubleshoot it briefly before just replacing her PC w/ a used custom built Pentium II mid-tower w/ Win2K instead. Otherwise, I put WinMe on a VM several years ago (as I have most older OSes on VMs), but never messed with it much.

[@TheSulross]

This video has served to show that there is some community of retro enthusiast that showers love and devotion on every retro OS and/or hardware - a community of Windows ME enthusiast? Now who would have thunk that?

[@controlport2]

Back in the day the PCs in my job first ran DOS, then Windows 95 and then, when I joined the company, Windows 98. My boss did all computer maintenance himself and was happy to get some help from someone who also knew computers. In these days my colleagues regularely killed their PCs. Windows 98 had far more possibilities to mess around with than a standard user should have had. So that led to regular reinstalls... completely with all the good stuff as installing the hardware and get the PC connected to our Novell-server. A pain in the xxx. :-) When Windwos Me arrived, the numbers of reinstalls massively dropped - thanks to the System Restore-function. And that was working properly. As I remember, one out of ten "problem PCs" needed a clean install after a crash, whereas the other one got back to work after the system restore. I know, many people made different experiences with Me. For me, it was the best OS back in that day. I am still using it from time to time. Nice memories... :-)

[@ThomasHolbrookII]

I had an HP Pavilion N5310 notebook with a 750 MHz Celeron, 128 MB of RAM, ESS Allegro Audio, a 10 GB IDE hard drive, DVD-ROM, ESS Allegro audio, an S3 Savage IX GPU with 8 MB of video RAM, an 1024x768 panel, two USB 1.1 ports, a modem, PCMCIA card slots, a parallel port, VGA port, and I believe a serial port among other features. I found out the hard way that Windows Me didn't do so well in the memory management department. When I closed a program, RAM wasn't always freed up. Oops! I'm sure subsequent updates fixed the problem and that most casual users wouldn't have noticed. However, if you ran the OS for a day or two straight, said memory management issue would be exposed.

[@adanalyst6925]

Man I grew up playing computer games on a HP Pavillion with windows ME. Such a piece of junk. Good times.

[@MeneGR]

I don't know why all this hate. I used WinMe for about 2 years, I would call them "Win98 GT". So much faster than 98SE! And stable: The only BSOD I got, was when a friend of mine was using the PC.

[@CommodoreFan64]

Before Windows 10 I would have to say Windows ME was one of the worst commercially released OS's, but I think WIndows 10 takes the cake these days, and WIndows 10 was the OS that made me into a full time Manjaro Linux user.

[@LEVELMotorsports]

I was around and playing games when this randomness was a thing. I had a Sound Blaster Audigy and a GeForce 256 card. Both of those companies made Windows 2000 drivers, and the latest Direct X was available for Windows 2000 then too. This meant that if you were running Windows 2000, you'd get NT reliability without any of the 9X unreliability and crashes. As a bonus, Windows 2000 had support for multiple processors. I had an ABIT VP6 with two 1Ghz Pentium III processors, which Windows 2000 could handle, but 9X/Me could not. There was absolutely no reason to run Me over 2000 for enthusiasts and gamers back then. Windows 2000 was an awesome OS, and is still one of my favorites.

[@shawnmelendy486]

I used & supported Windows ME back when it came out. Here are the issues I've run into I'll start with the biggest and it's not the DOS real mode (however that was really annoying). Biggest issue was the network stack. It had a modified version of w2k on a Win98 base. This caused many issues on a LAN. For instance every other user not using Me had to install a floppy disk program from the Windows ME system to talk with it. 2. It's network stack would corrupt databases *worked for Software company Tech support at the time and dealt with this often only had issues on Networked ME systems. Also I always did fresh installs ever since first version of Windows 98 found out upgrades were horrible. Also ran into other issues mentioned stability & driver issues. Just sharing my experience.

[@newdayoh]

I am a computer Tech person and have been since windows 3.1 and I loved Vista and Windows ME over XP and Windows 98.... Most people at that time had budget computers like HP that could barely run what came pre-installed, and some were built for win95 that had been upgraded to win98 and then again to winME and they simply didn't have what it takes to run ME efficiently so people blamed the OS instead of there PC's, by XP time most people had replaced there PC with a new XP budget PCs and ended up hating Vista for pretty much the same reasons as winME. Budget machines poorly running the OS.

[@mikehardy7060]

Apparently vastly outnumbered, I actually liked "Me". At the time having progressed through the different versions of windows right from 3.0, it became my favourite version of windows. I used '98 for multiplayer Doom on Novell IPX networking but I generally preferred "Me". Even when XP came out, I didn't "like" it more than "Me", it was just the next in the line.

[@nuttyjawa]

I worked in the tech department of a PC World during ME - ughhh dark days :)

[@jasper-byrne]

ran my studio in 2000-2002 on it on a custom built PIII 1Ghz, 1Gb ram, Matrox Millenium G400 with Yamaha DS2416 soundcard and AW44 expansion running Logic 5.5. was one of the most stable and responsive systems i ever used. switch to the mac in late 2002 when apple bought Emagic and it took many years to get a replacement as solid.

[@alangiles4616]

To me, the worst OS are Windows 8, 8.1 and 10. Bloated, intrusive, a total abomination. In fact I became so disgusted by Windows 10, that I now use a Chromebook, and nothing would induce me to go back to Big Brother

[@vonzigle]

I did an Me install for a pc I donated to a church - it was nothing but problems from the get-go.. . Crashes abounded and drivers were missing…

[@robertfoster6070]

In some workplaces NT did not have sound and there weren't any speakers available.

[@huleeyaxerssius7]

I don't think it's as bad as some say, haven't had any issues with it & if i have, were only rather minor. Was also the first OS i owned on my first PC back in 2002, don't remember all the specifications of it as i didn't look at that kind of thing back then. Had 64MB Ram a 2GB hard drive, standard beige box & the like you would've got then, still have the "Original" install CD that came with it, but the data rot has certainly gotten to it, though i keep it because it's one of the only things i have left of it. Is a copied disc, with the rbdc9 serial on it, that product key is everywhere on older windows OS'es. And the PC ran fine back then for me too. Haven't used any DOS type programs on ME, i have 95/98 machines for that if need be. Also have it on a Dell Latitude D600 & works good on there too, though it doesn't detect the DVD drive for whatever reason, so i use an external one when need be. Sure, can see why it wasn't much chop, everyone's experience with it was different would say, and in my case, has been fine. Back then on my first PC, and nowdays on the machines it is installed on.

[@lordhostile]

Windows ME was born out of MS's work on Win2K and was a last minute decision to actually release it as a standalone OS instead of an SP for 98. Frankly ME was a great OS on GOOD hardware...BUT it was absolute shiite on what we called "grey market chinese hardware" and would typically suffer from stability and legacy driver issues due to the use of the new WDM for 2k. Its a shame too since Windows 2k should have had its day in the sun but was pushed into the background and we didn't get the promise of a really good NT based OS until XP SP2...because let's be honest...XP(SP1) was garbage at best and wasnt really worth using until SP2. (During that time I was an MCP and MCSE as well as a MS Beta Partner) Great OS Vids! Cheers from Las Vegas!

[@ricksandstorm]

Our second computer came it. Worked just fine. Was immune to some of the viruses that was spreading around early XP too. Only upgraded to XP later due to peer pressure.

[@winstonsmith478]

Hell, no! Windows 8 by a LONG shot.

[@kshadehyaena]

I moved from 98 to ME and it was fine, but I didn't have many DOS games in the first place. I have vivid memories of having to re-install Windows 98, but not of ME. Might be because it was more stable, might be because it didn't take long until XP from there.

[@thelatiosmaster]

I think the problem with windows ME was kinda the same Vista: the average machines of the era Weren't not ready for it. Also having XP out so close to it just simply killed ot

[@DanielLopez-up6os]

OH BOI, The rollecoaster that was ME! My personal Choice was 2000 Pro, until windows 7 came out. I did have a laptop with XP aswell :D

[@EpicB]

I don't think I ever used ME. I do remember using 98 on an old desktop though. I think my mom mentioned trying 2000 and not liking it though. I do remember XP though. I never owned a Vista machine myself but I did get a Windows 7 laptop as a birthday present in 2010. Sadly I nuked the hard drive on it in 2014, coincidentally around the time my mom gave me a Windows 8 laptop she had gotten the year before (she got a tablet and we have a couple spare MacBooks). I still have that old Windows 8 machine (though I later put Windows 10 and/or Linux on it) but I am getting a new laptop since she assumed I had already gotten one by now.

[@Neojhun]

98 to XP to Win7 Beta. I was soo desperate to get rid of stock Windows Vista on my new powerful Laptop with Geforce Go7700 512mb. I resorted to daily driving Beta Windows 7 and it was still faster and more stable than Vista.

[@EpicB]

@@Neojhun Thankfully I got to skip over Vista.

[@Neojhun]

@@EpicB It was stock on the Asus A8JS 512mb VRAM version. A beast of a laptop yet it still got bogged down and strained under the buggyness of Vista. Win7 Release To Manufacturer was the first time it realy flew and showed me what it was capable of. Even Beta was a little buggy.

[@EpicB]

@@Neojhun Windows 7 was definitely one of the best Windows releases. I used Vista on at least one other person's computer but otherwise I never really got to experience it first hand.

[@gentuxable]

If your machine was made for Me it worked quite good but if you upgrade an old system it often failed, that’s my experience.

[@MotownBatman]

I Still Love Me to this Day, I though it was Great, but I Pissed my parents off When I bricked our AMD DX4-100 trying to Upgrade from 98. We had to take it down south for a Weekend trip from Detroit to Tennessee, He had to Serial in and back everything up

[@Ur11]

seriously, could Windows Me be worse that the slow train crash that was Windows Vista ?

[@stephensalex]

I ran Windows Me for years and had no problems. I think a lot of people who had issues, those were either dirty upgrades or forcing 9x drivers on Me.

[@mathiasdreke180]

I haven't even tried the Movie Maker on Windows ME since it was constantly crashing when trying to load video files.

[@ibizenco]

Windows 98 was WORSE than Windows Millennium (aka ME) - if only for this: when a program crashed in Win98, the entire OS would crash a few second later. When a program crashed in WinME, Windows would keep on running (and would only hang during shutdown), I remember well. So, no, Windows ME was not the worst Version of Windows (Windows 11, anyone, LOL?) Same with Windows Vista, by the way (which, I admit, I have only had from 2012 on, so I have not known the countless problems (??) from the first years). To me, Vista was... the... well... "best" Windows version. Oh, Vista, where art thou?... I have decided I will not get that God-awful Windows 11 abomination.

[@Some_Werewolf_Dude]

It feels so strange to see a Raid Shadow Legends sponsorship on this channel of all things!

[@dsly4425]

I’d be extremely surprised if you had a 1999 emachines computer with anything approaching a 1ghz processor. Honestly I’d be amazed if it was much above 500 MHz. Since 333 and 400 were still crazy common at the time, unless you were paying a couple grand.

[@FBHSswimmer2006]

My Mom had bought a Dell Dimension L Series (budget) PC in 2000 and it came with ME, despite me trying to convince her to get it with 98 SE. It was 50/50 with us. If we didn't push it too hard it was ok. More often the programs we would run would crash a lot, than the OS itself. I do remember several times the OS corrupting and we would have to get DOS running again before repairing ME. That was a pain the a**. We upgraded to XP Pro in 2004 and it was WAY more stable.

[@kovyvuri]

Of course that was an issue with 9x stability in general, less about ME in general.

[@FBHSswimmer2006]

@@kovyvuri I never experienced the amount of crashes on 98 SE, and no OS corruption either.

[@alwanrosyidi3753]

Didn't think so. CMIM, it is the first windows version that support usb flash disk by default.

[@windowsme1607]

20 years? Dang I'm old.

[@eupher2]

I tried Windows ME on 3 computers back in the day. The first one Blue Screened as soon as the desktop came up. The Second one was fine for a couple days then Blue Screened at random. The third one worked as long as you didn't open Internet Explorer. All three were fresh installs, but I tired Windows 2000 on the same machines, and they ran wonderfully. Only one computer was mine, the other two I was fixing for people who were having issues. But downgraded the two I was fixing back to Win98 and they were fine.

[@bitdevice]

I was running Windows Me for 4-5 years and I had almost zero problems with it. Compared to my previous machine with Windows 95 it was much more stable and allowed me to play my favorite DOS games. Along with 2000, Me is the best looking Windows and XP the ugliest.

[@judenihal]

15:00 - This is wrong. Absolutely wrong! Windows 9x and ME does NOT emulate any part of DOS when you run a DOS application within windows. You are mixing this up with Windows NT's fake NTVDM which emulates almost everything which is just as good enough to emulate basic DOS applications, but not games. Windows 9x and ME runs DOS programs side-by-side and gives the DOS program DIRECT access to the hardware. The reason why DOS programs run better booting directly into DOS is because Windows still uses hardware such as the sound card, which cannot be released to the DOS application, and sound card manufacturers has to write drivers to "emulate" a sound card for the DOS application to see it as a usable device which will then pass it to Windows to play the sound. Other than drivers written for DOS emulation, NOTHING is emulated within Windows 9x/ME. Don't confuse the MS-DOS prompt with Windows NT's terrible NTVDM emulator. I was against Windows XP when it was released for this very reason.

[@90sDiesel]

I hope your not against xp now I’ve been continuously using it since it was current to the present day by far the best os of time a bit more difficult to run as the years go on but still no plans to get rid

[@judenihal]

@@90sDiesel Windows XP was straight up garbage back in 2001 and 2002 especially when Windows 2000 was faster and more efficient than Windows XP. After 2002 it has been my main operating system until 2011, we had to go to Windows 7 64-bit because newer computers are 64-bit.

[@90sDiesel]

I’ll agree that rtm and sp1 certainly wasn’t the finished product but sp2 and 3 when it came out certainly improved on a good base I liked the simplicity of Win2k and the stability

[@hpbifta]

Give the pc more than a GB of RAM ( for example 3x512 Mb sticks) and watch Windows ME constantly bug out when it falls into memory holes when using more than the one gig mark.

[@CommodoreFan64]

or run it on a lowend base emachines with a Celeron with 1mb of video ram for the onboard GPU, and a low 64 - 128MB of system RAM, and it was just as bad at causing all kind of system instability.

[@michaelrichardson8467]

Computers really were the wild west back then. The point I'm making is I honestly think Microsoft made M.E. and Vista "flops" on purpose to give the major companies time to adjust. With all the rightful Antitrust suits against them they couldn't be caught talking to these other oem's and sharing inside info with them and not the smaller guys. Driver support at M.E's launch was fucking horrific. Just like Vista. Microsoft released it to say "hey this is where we're going get your shit right we'll take the heat for now but the next release you better comply" People hated Vista and 7 is just a glorified clone thar got more and longer support. Basically M.E. and Vista gave the H.P's and Konica's time to update their driver package. After the initial driver issues settled and people got the support they should've had from day one M.E. and Vista are stable and laid the foundation for some of the most important moves Microsoft has made post IBM exclusivity.

[@MC-1173]

Nice video Dan. I remember using "Me" quite a bit. Worked well for the most part. Really only crashed on me while gaming. Back then we actually transported our entire PC, Monitor, and peripherals to friends houses for "Game Nights" and the infamous LAN parties. After dealing with the pretty frequent game crashes, I switched over to "2000." Liked it better and never looked back. Well I guess that isn't entirely true. I did make a "DOS Box" and installed 95 (w/ MS-Dos), 98, Me, and 2000 using System Commander. As like you, nostalgic reasons. I think I'm going to fire that up now after seeing your video. :)

[@blue_jm]

My mate had Windows ME for sometime around 2005 or so. I remember indeed having to help him finding suitable drivers that wouldn't crash his system all the time. I think he reinstalled ME at least 2 or 3 times while he had it. I believe it also was missing some things I could do on XP at that time that weren't available for ME. I can't remember what those things were, I think it might have been regarding to some networking stuff.

[@joea3728]

For me, the worst was Windows 95 retail version. I never did get it to work on my computer. And apparently none of the professional could get it to work either. Microsoft said there was no difference between the retail and manufacturers version. But just before Windows 98 was released, I was given a copy of the manufacturer's version. It installed and ran. But I cannot say that it ran without problems, It crashed nearly every day. When Windows 98 came out, I tried it. It was better but is still crashed. Windows me was much better. Although I did have to fix a few problems. For some reason, task scheduler was interfering with my menus. When I clicked on a menu, it would appear and then disappear before I could make a selection. And Microsoft was no help. Their help Representative was condescending and rude. By that time, I had been dealing with computers for nearly 20 years. So I trace down the problem and fixed it myself. I updated the drivers regularly and tweaked a few things, and it was one of the best operating systems up to that date. I used it until Windows 7 came out. Without any other problems. In my opinion, It's bad reputation is not deserved. And remember, reports of windows 95 not working was everywhere. That is 1reason they got sued.

[@Dman216]

i had issues with cards on ME.. i upgraded my vid card lan and switched over to a sound card and had no issues after that .. worked perfect

[@davidhabert]

I never had any major issues with Windows ME and found it to be very easy to work with, it very rarely crashed when I was using it. But out of all the different versions of Windows I've come across over the years, the worst version I've had the misfortune of using was Windows Vista, when I was using that pile of shit I was spending most of my life bashing my PC to bits. I never once had that problem with ME. I personally don't think Windows ME was the worst version of Windows that ever came out, Vista was.

[@config2000]

I once bought a PC with "Media Edition". Truly the worst. It had a TV guide program that was set to automatically turn on the PC at 4am just to update the TV guide listing! Argh. To make things worse the only way you could change this time was by playing with Regedit. Not sure which genius thought that was a good idea.

[@VioletDragonsProjects]

Me wasn't that bad. I had more hassle with this is an illegal operation back in the 98 days which was annoying.Never really had any issues with Vista neither all depended on Memory back then. I would rather use Me over Windows 10 thats for sure!

[@enzedpcs2]

I think one of the problems, was that windows 2000 was so much better and was becoming common w

[@davinp]

ME was jokingly dumbed Mistake Edition. It worked well on some hardware and others it did not. It was buggy because rushed it out as a consumer version of WIndows 20000.

[@AlidarJarok1]

Guess I was the odd man out, I had Windows 2000 for home use. Got a free copy from a friend, loved it.

[@JosephDickersonUX]

It's all about device drivers. Me was rushed out without extensive testing and because of that it regularly crashed with multiple hardware configs and 3rd party software. You got luck with your install. Put in a couple of new PCI cards, install some games, and then come back to us...

[@iangodfrey4518]

I got my first PC in 99 or 2000, and that was from using an Amiga 3000. It used windows 98 and I couldn't believe all the little bugs that was in Windows, coming from Amiga OS. The BSOD, the mysterious Black Screen Crash (persistent), my installed modem would occasionally and randomly disappear mysteriously between shutdowns and restarts - something that really bugged me, as I could see no reason why my modem would disappear from the system configuration, and would need to be reinstalled to get back online. I honestly could not see what the world saw in windows, and wondered how companies actually managed to function if they used it. The error message that would pop up, and then repeat diagonally up the screen about 20 times before crashing the entire system. I just hated it. The moment I installed ME, all those bugs basically disappeared. But then I found windows XP to be shite, and that took years before it was stable. Vista was shit. Windows is still shite. In fact, I had this theory, that basically windows 95 to 98 were basically beta versions of windows. But I have since changed my opinion: all windows versions prior to windows XP were Alpha versions - not intended for public release, and Windows XP and basically every version after that are still stuck in Beta. Something they have not been able to get out of.

[@Core2lee91]

I kinda get why Windows Me is pointless in context of 98se or 2000, but my first "proper" PC was an E-Machines one just like this, and ran Windows Me and I genuinely didn't have an issue with it, it always seemed a lot more polished (visually) than anyones PC I knew at the time who ran Windows 98. Pretty cool feature though of the e-machines PC I had was the 20GB HDD had a recovery partition which used Norton Ghost so meant it was super clean to rest to factory defaults if shit hit the fan.

[@obsoletepowercorrupts]

Some computer (video) games will make it crash in the old win98 way (unlike xp). Likewise some video editing etc. after hours of usage. Advantages of WinMe though include old win98 drivers for many scanners, printers, midi soundcards and game controllers (decent flightsticks etc., if you have the driver disks) as winxp simply won't support those. It is good to know when you have the usb mass storage device support in WinMe (as a crutch).

[@charlieoscar09]

Windows 8 guarantee'd thousands switched to Linux...what a shocker that was. Windows ME was fine.

[@JayVBear45]

I really like your retro content - I'm still a big Amiga fan though I no longer own any Amiga hardware or software. Back in the day, here in the US, when Windows ME, Millenial Edition, came out, we always called it M-E, not me, but Microsoft marketing did start selling it that way shortly after its initial launch. It just makes me cringe whenever someone says, "Me" instead of M.E. And it is still a pretty bad operating system that did get better after much upgrading from Windows 2000/NT and went on to become an even better and more stable system i.e. Windows XT and Windows 7.

[@woodsmn8047]

I had a gateway PC with this OS and Never could see what all the fuss was about ... it ran fine for me

[@Lee-Wood-DK]

I bought it on day one, it had a launch offer for the upgrade, it was £30 as far as I remember the first few months.. It was awful at the beginning but did get much better with updates BSOD was a huge problem at first

[@airness21]

Day one technology gives errors every time

[@okekoke1962]

Enjoyed your video of windows Me iv got an old desktop and look forward to trying Me for myself and I am glad you mentioned the Retrozilla browser iv been looking for a browser to work with old operating systems for quite a while and this will be really useful thanks

[@El_Guapo74]

Yep I bought that new back in the day, no system builder OEM, full price. I don't remember it being crap but I did go buy XP at full retail price shortly after

[@dave4shmups]

Excellent video as always Dan! What model of Pentium 4 is in your Windows 98 PC? I love Windows 98 and use Pentium II PCs are pretty expensive here in the USA.