Installing Windows ME (Millennium Edition) on an IBM 300PL Pentium III Desktop PC! 

It’s amazing to me how often I see people saying “eww gross, Windows ME sucks” and then vouch for Windows 98 SE…like I get it, we all loved Windows 98, but it was just as unstable, sometimes more so. I know that experience is subjective, but I think we can all agree going to an NT based operating system like Windows 2000 was like night and day. Microsoft struck gold with that OS and has never topped it. This is why we love old OS’s. A pure experience without the bloat, telemetry and constant advertising that we have to deal with in today’s Windows releases. Microsoft has never been a particularly honorable company, but it’s really REALLY sad to see the state of things now. It’s very dystopian-like. I used to be excited for new Windows releases (ie: Longhorn) but now I don’t even bother. It’s just a vehicle for soliciting user data and advertisement revenue. It’s why I long for retro-tech, when things were more interesting, dynamic and pure in it’s experience. Slow and unstable, but simpler and straight to the point. Maybe I’m just full of it. That’s also a possibility.

I have an IBM Windows 95 computer upgraded to Windows Me. It is still used and runs DOS games without any problem. Each new edition of Windows was a HUGE EVENT with spotlights pointed skyward to celebrate. I kept buying more and more computers as technology advanced. My basement is a virtual computer museum. I loaned the IBM out to family members for a few years, but it found its way back to me and I still use it for older games. The hard drive held 3 gb's in 3 partitions and was eventually upgraded. You had to back it up with a tape drive at first and that is still on the machine. The floppy was used to back up and restore the hard drive or to partition it. A Voodoo 3 graphics card was added as well. Computer stores have come and gone but that IBM just keeps rolling along.

I don't recall major problems with Windows Millennium back in the days. It's only when I got on the internet, years later, when I heard people complain. Yes, the lack of MS-DOS mode was annoying, but back in the days, I ran a multiboot setup anyway so that wasn't a problem. So, what I say, Windows ME was a Windows 9x version with decent USB MSD support

@17:58 - just a small correction about the release dates of ME and 2000; Windows 2000 was released in 1999 while ME was released in 2000, so ME came after. Some of the features of Win2k were backported into ME as a result, such as Compressed Folders (which, incidentally was a feature added by David Plummer, a.k.a. RU-vid's Dave's Garage). I never used ME due to all the complaints people had, however as a retro-collector myself I decided to buy a copy and try it out and to my surprise, it actually ran very well. I agree that in hindsight drivers were very likely the cause of a lot of people's problems. Vista had a similar problem, though that OS I actually upgraded to on day 1 of its' release, along with brand new hardware (I always built my own) and ensured all drivers were 64-bit Vista compatible. Zero problems. I liked Vista more than XP! But that's another topic. As far as the memory goes, all versions had a bug in the VCACHE.VXD driver (the hdd cache) which had problems with systems that had greater than 512MB of RAM. A workaround was to edit the SYSTEM.INI file and go to the [VCACHE] section (add one if needed) and add the line MAXFILECACHE=524287 (1 kilobyte less than 512MB). Beyond that, there were some older sound and video drivers that had issues with 1GB of RAM or more. Assuming the aforementioned line was added, and assuming you had proper driver support, Win9x and ME can handle up to 2GB of RAM.

Your desktop PC setup is awesome. I miss a lot with old good times.

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.

My first impressions around the time of release were fairly negative - the preloaded installation on a brand new IBM NetVista seemed to have issues with stability, random lockups, inconsistent hibernation and power management... the works. But it improved a lot over time. Subsequent BIOS updates from IBM improved the power management and stability situation a lot. Updates for the SiS 630 chipset and integrated graphics made the random lockups far and few between. Windows Updates fixed System Restore and made a bunch of other small quality-of-life improvements. By the time that machine was replaced, my perception of Windows Me had turned around. It's easily my go-to operating system for retro computers today. With BIOS updates, the newest available device drivers and Windows updates installed, I almost never have problems with it, even on unusual combinations of hardware or when using less-common or obscure devices and chipsets. Being a Windows 9x system, it's excellent for using hardware devices that struggled under Windows NT-based systems (like the Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Wheel's customisation tools, or the Aureal Vortex 2's A3D feature), and I haven't personally encountered a DOS game or application yet that hasn't worked within the protected mode DOS environment. The improvements to networking and USB mass storage support make transferring files much easier out-of-the-box, so it's much easier to get up and running as well. Seems it was a good operating system, with a reputation that it couldn't shake off even long after the problems were resolved. Today however, it's a solid choice for an older machine.

ME was a huge hit with me and my family mainly thanks to ICS. At the time, we were first DSL customer in our area, such that they sent an installer and two more workers to train on how to do it. It was extremely cutting edge for the time and city where we were. They installed a splitter box outside the house and a NIC in your PC because they often didn’t come with networking. The modem used a bridged PPPoE connection which is a one-PC type of connection. Home routers as we know them did not exist. Anyway, I had two Windows 98 PCs in my house and getting this working was a real nightmare and mostly didn't work. ME came along and ICS let me share the DSL from the main PC to the second PC, virtually troublefree. It was a major game changer that got the whole family on board with this crazy internet thing I was doing. System Restore also came with ME and was also incredibly useful when I had family members doing who knows what to their computers. Having ME was really the turning point when my little home computing experiment became a "real thing" that was fun and useful.

I always enjoy your tech videos. I am afraid of replacing caps do you have a video tutorial on the subject since you explain really well.

Can i just come over for a bit and click around on all these old systems?? The nostalgia! My mom bought us a Gateway in like 2001 with Windows ME on it. Good times on AOL during those days

My experience with Windows Me in 2000 was also very positive. I had very few issues and actually had a more stable experience than I did with 98 SE on the same system. Not sure why Me gets all the hate. I think its just people jumping on a bandwagon.

WOW😱This video really took me down memory lane✅👍🏻for all the BAD reasons I had a LOVE/HATE relationship with windowsME.

I personally hated Windows 98 when I was a child, I remember that it almost always lost the CD drive drivers and my father almost always had to install them again with the DOS floppy, not to mention the numerous blue screens. At the time I had a Celeron 1002 GHZ I remember very well when Windows Me came out my father bought the update that I still have today with original box for his company and then he also upgraded my computer from 98 to Me. I loved it! For this reason I cannot understand people's hatred for Me, certainly it did not have a DOS mode and it could happen that there were not all the drivers designed for it, but it was great when installed on "powerful" computers. Just a few hours ago talking about Windows 98 I installed it on another Celeron 2.40 GHZ and already started as the blue screen as soon as you started a game. For this reason I have another hard disk with Windows 95 B made compatible with the FIXCPU95 and it works a lot better than 98

Windows ME was my first proper introduction to Windows and personal computers in general. I really liked it, but since I was inexperienced I didn't really see any problems with it. Long load times was kinda expected as I've seen and used IBM DOS computer before. Then it was decided to wipe ME from PC and install Windows XP. I was so disappointed and really hated XP. It was even slower and wasn't really compatible with old Win98/ME games I'm used to play. Eventually I've got my own PC and Windows XP SP2 was installed on it after which I started to grow on me. XP was not good before SP2 and even with SP2 I still had problems with old games. So my liking of ME never really faded, but I sure couldn't use it anymore.

If you were playing games and into entertainment then Windows ME was capable and looked great on a beefier computer. I had a Pentium 3 866Mhz, 512MB of RAM and a GeForce 2 GTS in that rig and it played games very well at 1024,768 up to 1600x1200 for titles that weren't demanding. Win ME just had a great look to it and it's issues didn't pop up during my time using it. My girlfriend's family had a Compaq from Sears with ME as well. I think it was a Duron 700 Mhz, 64MB and a Vanta LT. For an underpowered machine like that it was slow but didn't crash.

Great video✌

I put ME on my daughter's computer when it came out, and after a week she demanded that I put her old OS back on. 😁

One of my favourite retro machines. I got one as well, also running windows ME

I never had more problems with Windows ME, than the ones i had with Windows 98, anyway both were cool OSes for the time

The comments are pretty interesting. Me too I had a good experience with ME back in the day. It worked well for me.

If someone doesn't need pure DOS mode (because the mods to get it have been janky for me) I still argue that Windows ME is miles better than 98 from stability standpoint!

I ran ME for a couple days. I went from 98 to ME, 2 days later went back to 98, then a week later went to 2000. But when it came to Vista and everybody hated Vista I loved Vista, never really had issues with Vista.

2000 ended up being a good consumer OS too, I basically skipped ME, in some ways I found it better than XP. Im fairly sure the popularity of 2000 as being attractive to standard enthusiasts as well as business actually caused it to outsell ME, thus likely spurring the introduction of XP. Just as XP shared about 90% commonality with 2000 code, To this day interally WIndows 10 is known as "NT 10" likely still sharing alot of windows 2000 core code. Oh and a side note ME did have one advantage that it was slightly faster than 98 in some tasks, But it had the same Basic requirements, witch means im pretty sure it would run fine even on a fast 486. And Tip: Most 98 drivers work fine in ME, some even in Windows 2000 if I am not mistaken.

You know you might be true about windows me since introduced the new driver model asked for new pc and people not having the new drivers cause some never had, had to use win 98 drivers. Also people tought it was the same requirements from win 98, no win98se that was on new pcs. Also the lack of dos hurt winme identity.

Funny, I’m also one of those who didn’t have any issues with Millennium edition. I had Pentium 3 450 and 256 mb of ram. I migrated directly to the laptop in university period, with Windows XP pre installed on it. It was in 2003

ME needs a directx capable 3d graphics card to run properly. 98 will run fine with only a 2d vga card but ME wont. Trying to run with only a 2d card will lead to frequent bsod and other erratic behavior. Hung apps, and headaches. It doesnt have to be fancy, a barebones 3d card like a rage pro turbo 128 agp will do if you dont actually plan to play games, but a nvidia tnt2 or radeon 9600 is what i consider bare minimum. Also you need a hardware based network card or modem. ME doesnt like winmodems or software controlled ethernet cards. Make sure your optical drive and/or zip drive is on the second ATA channel and only the Boot Hdd/SSD is on the primary ATA channel. (Boot drive on its own flat cable. Others on a separate flat cable). Check that you have the right PIII core. Coppermine introduced a bug due to how ME handles memory, which tualatin fixed. (Copppermine memory caching opcodes dont play nice with how ME handles memory). All PII processors are fine as are all AMD chips, but for the PIII you want either the original katmai core or the later tualatin core. Wilamette p4 has similar problems due to rambus, but all other s478 p4 fix it with the move to ddr.

The video at 43:00+ plays when you first reach to the Desktop after an installation fresh or not. The graphics driver was not found and the preview video didn't play. I guess that the Desktop had to be 800x600 of resoltion.

I Loved ME; I got a Bootlegg copy back in the day, thought I'd upgrade our 486... and killed the system... Had to take it down to TN and have my uncle Serial in to backup everything lol I got into some major trouble, so maybe I always go play and play with it on a old pos or a VM just to get my time out of it for the scolding I got lol

37:45 Yes, Briefcase worked like how OneDrive (and other cloud drives) work today.

ME could be unstable at launch due to bad drivers and mixed driver types(mixing the older VXD drivers with the newer WDM drivers.

I miss that, how can I get a hard drive with it installed?

I have a OEM version and after it copies all the files and I get the first restart I have to chose start setup again or boot with CD-Rom support or boot from Hard Drive - I tried all the options and end up in an endless loop to chose all over. I must just be a dumb _______.

I don't know I have ever worked with ME. I guess the closest I've come is windows 2000.

Luckily I've never had to deal with that 9x nonsense. Windows 2000 FTW!

I like the funky media player skins in me

Sure, pineball is nice. But that box copy of AoE2 is begging to be played.

ME really was never that bad. It just was easy to meme on.

Never really cared about windows until XP

You're somewhere in the maritimes