The Windows Me Experience: Was It THAT Bad? 

Depends on the feedback she gave 😄

Someone now has to travel back in time to that era and stop your mom from ever reaching the Microsoft product testing center!

Imagine having that be your family’s eternal legacy. “the focus group idiots who helped greenlight Microsoft’s biggest mistakes” lmao

@@thebasketballhistorian3291 i will go back in time for a lot of reasons. Should I stop Windows ME entirely?

@@Tobi_DarkKnight yes

LOL! That's true.

I pray to the gods of Linux I want be possessed with BSOD

"I wonder what version of Real Player we'll be up to by then..."

Wait, u guys never use Windows ME before???

Same, yet here we are hahaha!

i still use it on my mini netbook xp, as a server, still runs to this day. Love it.

I feel like I’m the only one who hated xp, it’s so bland and looks like a toy lol

@@dparent4487 Yea its prety basic but it did a lot of things tho for being sooo basic and bland, but you know, you could always "dress" it up to look nicely even like windows 7,9,10 whatever lol; remember windows 10 is just a fancy dress. Only thing that sucks now, as they progressed, they tried to dumb Down windows and remove features due to the new "mobile" design on phones, they were taking the "APPLE" approach, so it would be dummy proof.

@@koilamaoh4238 Nothing is ever idiot-proof, because idiots are so ingenious.

@@koilamaoh4238 He's probably still remember how XP was hated when it's released.

Yea system restore was mostly the culprit. I did a fresh install of windows me and disable system restore right away, and it will be as rock solid and maybe even more lovable as windows 98se.

Yeah, it worked fine a while, then it just become so unstable, that you had to do a clean install after some months. Then i got Win2000, which was NT-based, with NTFS (vs FAT), and that was rock solid, happy days.

System Restore in Me had a bug where it broke after September 14th 2001. So if you broke your system before getting the patch, System Restore would go through all the motions but then finish off with that dreaded "Restore Failed" popup. It was soul destroying to wait for so long as it went through the motions only to find it was all for nought. I was lumbered with Me on the "new" family PC after we replaced a 5 year old Windows 95 system. Worst still, it was a budget system that could just run Me and it was too underpowered to run XP (plus we had a bunch of hardware which wasn't supported). Combine that with the fact my father (the other main user of the PC) was so upset with how much more unstable Me was from 95, he was reluctant to move across to XP. So I had to suffer around 3 years of Me... That was until one day I just bought a new hard drive, upgraded the RAM and installed XP fresh and we moved on. I remember my first day after Windows XP, coming from Me, my first initial reaction was "Why did I suffer for so long!?!" On the flipside, Me has taught me excellent diagnostic and troubleshooting skills as that was what I spent most of my computing hours in Me doing!!

​@@grummpyyounggeek System Restore was a godsend to me, just in case something happened at the office. But I was good at patching the OS via Windows Update, so I never experienced that System Restore bug.

you don't know bad until you use Vista. If ME was bad, Vista was worse, but what is Funny the best version of Windows (XP) was between the two worst version of Windows.

No tbh, UAC was new and people werent used to having to manage security.

I just installed it on an Athlon XP 3000+ with 1GB of RAM and... it actually runs faster on that thing than I remembered. It's not blindingly fast, but I can't describe it as anything other than snappy once it's done booting up. Remove half that memory to keep in line with XP spec (512MB was really common) and it chugs like there's no tomorrow though.

Don't forget 8/8.1 and 10 Particularly the Windows 10 upgrade nag that would upgrade the computer upon clicking the red X close button.

Anonymous UAC was pretty annoying when it popped up for seemingly no reason. Once you understood why you could forgive it, but sometimes it would pop up for a thing already installed with seemingly no need to access higher system stuff, which would really confuse people at best, and downright annoy them at worst.

@@jameswalker199 Wasn't 8.1 actually not that bad, but it didn't have very good support because poor adoption, because regular window 8 sucked so much?

So that's what happened to "Where did you learn to fly" head from Cybermorph

Also Lawnmower Man

it’s made for listening to the matrix trilogy soundtracks rlly

Reminds me of the first Xbox’s UI. Nostalgic!

the nostalgia in this video is killing me :(

Has System Restore ever worked properly though? I last had to try to use it with Windows 8.1 a few years ago. And it couldn't load the restore point, so I had to do a fresh reinstall anyway.

@@fisk0 I used System Restore many many times. It was very rare that it didn't work. Windows must be so much more sturdy now because I have only used System Restore once or twice in the last five years

Wait so Windows Me isn’t bad?

its driver database was wayy bigger then the legacy stuff before it

To be fair, for most non-computer savvy users "Did you plug the device in and turn it on?" probably solves half of their computer problems.

That applys to modern Windows as well.

Hello mr turner it's me, mr turner :D

cortana can clearly help you with this it's not like cortana is diet coke bonzi buddy or anything

@@realdragonrude I keep 6 feet away for fear of catching the Cortanavirus.

This made my garbage week just a little happier

@@bradlauk1419 everything ok?

I kind of want to spin up a vm and try this

@@CoryDickes it won't work

@@plaguis1391 you don't know that you dishwashing machine

getting high to that shit was an experience for sure

spider's last moment, strawberryaid, dance of the freaky circles..

I would too but I would also search online for all the custom player skins I was obsessed with skins for my computer, For every application I could get a skin for it I had one

@@Roanoak I was never able to hook up my computer to the internet unfortunately. Only one computer in the house had Internet access, and it was in my parents bedroom.And it was dial up

Joey Ignacio I’ve managed to do that but I didn’t know what I clicked and my home page became a porn website and I had no idea how to change it, one day I was playing with my little girl friend and when I opened IE she saw the website and I was embarrassed as fuck, thank god she is my wife now.....

CragScrambler I still get nostalgic for that fountain visualization.

Winamp: Hold my beer

@@virgenfj Winamp really whipped the Llama's ass, though.

AIMP is my favorite because of the conversion tool. I also like the simplicity of the skins

NOBODY used the skins (maybe 0.1% of the users).

It came out after Windows 2000 and was more of a service pack for Windows 98. Plus, a lot of programs did cause stability issues with it. Windows 9x in general has a lot of those kind of problems. Given how quickly ME was replaced by XP, it should have never been a standalone release.

Windows ME was 98SE patched with code from Windows NT 5.0, disabled access to real mode MS - DOS basically emulating a NT environment, the first version of system restore and Movie maker

"These aren't the Windows you're looking for"

Nice

As Maul said to Obi-Wan after he killed his master - let's let Qui-Gons be Qui-Gons

llcoolray3000 Actually, I do not associate ME with its normal startup sound. The company that builds our computers set the startup sound for my ME tower to this loud bombastic jingle that would blow your ears out if you had the speakers up too loud. For years, I believed that WAS the normal ME startup jingle, and the piano jingle was only in 2000. I wish I could find it again...

I'm so old, I remember desktops caked in the tar from when people smoked in offices.

At least it told you something closed, instead of just 'Something Happened.'

Better than Windows 10 Error Messages

You can get this error message in every version from Windows 3.X to Me. "Unknown" is displayed instead of missing driver description text. There are also similar versions like unknown has caused problem because unknown was working. I also like error message when printing: Error: Operation completed succesfully. :-)

"No keyboard detected. Press any key to continue" is my favourite.

"...has performed an illegal operation" Should I call the police?

you missed 2k.. its was great

I found it! ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9rmevy8B_Wc.html

@@DGTelevsionNetwork OMG that is great. I hope these comments get upvoted for more views for that!

Windows CEMeNT - As hard as a rock, and dumb as a brick.

I have a pre-setup Windows 3.11 installation in DOSBox and it came with that image. I'm I remember correctly, it said "as hard as a brick, as dumb as a rock"

It would be interesting to see the boot times comparison on a machine with harddisk. I remember seeing "Me" on computers at the store, but I don't think I ever used it on a computer. My family was happy with 98, until we bought a new computer when XP came out

Just downloaded an xp VM, thanks

Internal and external crying 😭

You can always download VM and then install XP on it, and i bet someone made Space Cadet compatible with W10

@@looneyburgmusic Really, i didn't know tbh

You can still play it, works on win 10/11

Jesus Christ I did the same thing. Kernel 32 error was my life in college and it was a miracle I got anything done due to it.

I have the same thing for the windows 95 product key (VMs though)

My windows 95 code is 11195-0000000 00000. And yes, it actually works

Same with 98se and I still remember it.

@Jimmy S The first field is a manufacture date

Did you ever see ME have icons and popups from the Start Menu, and programs, stay on the screen and stack? I did on my first day or so of using ME.

User: “I want to play this game” Me: “wait, that’s illegal.”

i wonder who wrote the operating system rules and regulations

The message that used to scare me as a child was that really dumb "the file may become unusable" warning you get when you try to rename a file and change its extension.

@@FireballFlame Isn't this present even in present days?

Windows 10: "Something happened."

I still deal with that today.

meanwhile in linux land: "nothing is happening because nothing is wrong. sure... we don't have the exact program you want, but here's a free open source version that does all of the same stuff... but a little differently... and if you can get used to it, we do pretty good~"

@@elerileigh7926 I think you are oversimplifying FOSS a bit there, though I certainly appreciate the verbosity of Linux :p

😂

Hold up. Somebody actually thought OS9 had a fighting chance?

Alex Paulsen IDK man. I grew up on OS9 and classic OS X. It was pretty fun. And yes, we had games. And yes, we could unzip things.

@@rockettaco OS9 was awful, but what's worse is Apple insisted on saving the NSF formatting of their drives and fudging it into the Mach (BSD) kernel they "appropriated" for OS X. Linus Torvalds (of Linux fame) spoke out rather heavily against such a stupid and inefficient decision. Sure, he's a Linux guy and probably has a bias, but he gives credit to other operating systems where credit is due.

@@calebcooper Apple's Mac line was on an upswing prior to the iPhone. Just a few years prior they had switched to Intel processors, and the iPod and iTunes had also brought more attention to the company in the early 2000s. That's relevant because they both worked better with a Mac than Windows, which, in conjunction with colorful hardware and marketing, had made their product line popular with college students and teens as laptops and desktops became the norm in dorms. The switch to Intel also made them a more practical option for the education setting due to improved support and feature parity for Mac versions of software from Microsoft, Adobe, and IBM. It didn't hurt that Vista was somewhat of a disappointment.

I had similar experiences with it. I don't know if a lot of problems people had stemmed from upgrading from 98 (I did a clean install). It "just worked" for me. All the same, I was excited when XP came out.

Yeah it's probably somewhat over hyped like a lot of stuff talked about on the Internet. However I did have more issues with me (factory) ME machine than any other computer I've used, and they went away when I upgraded it to the fantastic XP.

Yeah I feel that. The passage of time sucks.

Heh, I still have my MSN's saved on floppy from 98'. And only on floppy. Because well no one else will figure it out now. Almost no one.

I still have Jazz Jackrabbit in my collection, plus me, 98 1/2, 95. OS/2 Warp if your feeling a bit insane. But dumped all the 3.1 / 3.11 floppies

@@terry6131 Heh, I still have floppy copies of Win 3.11. And they still work!

I had the same, my neighbor couldn't believe it, he learned me everything I knew then

@@raketman101 *taught

I remember having to reinstall Me so much after it would just freeze up on the startup screen that, to this day, I get nervous if any Windows OS takes a longer than normal time to get past the start screen. And the Me startup screen logo just flat out gives me nightmares. I think I must have Windows Me PTSD from it.

If you used LimeWire, Napster, etc. it was probably both.

@Benita Shabibo I remember having to hunt for DLL files for programs to run properly all the time. Such a pain. XD SP2 for XP was such a great update for stability!

To be fair, if you became a patron or youtube supporter, then you can help him to bring your more videos about expensive stuff :D

You can run older operating systems on virtual machines. I did that with ME a few years ago and it was horrible (ME, not the VM).

Same here never had any problem

I have to agree. I had a 10yo Gateway PC that ran ME, and it booted up and operated much faster than our HP that ran Vista.

I have a similar Millennium Compaq as in the beginning of the video with the original Windows Me installed. It works fine with its default setup. However, at some point I went testing on how some components would go in addition, like alternate graphics cards and sound cards and whatnot (it doesn't actually have that much slots available to swap things). I can't remember which hardware configuration was it, but with some parts connected the Windows startup took literally hours, and I thought the HDD had broken all the sudden or that I had awakened some slumbering ancient God's computer virus. But I guess no, since everything ran smoothly again after removing all additional components. Maybe it was a driver issue (and it was virtually impossible to change the drivers or anything in that state). Might some day experiment a bit in case I'd be able to repeat that state and figure out what actually caused it.

I too was around 9-10 years old when my family bought a new pc with Windows ME on it. It was a Gateway PC (yes i know), it actually worked pretty good out of the box, especially watching DVDs which was huge for us. The problems started when we stuffed a mid range AGP graphics card, a few games on it, along with Microsoft Office (Microsoft Works back then). Had so many system crashes, attempts to use system restore, or that ugly white desktop "Safe Mode". It was really good for basic use, but for more stability and reliability we upgraded to XP Professional when it came out.

u old shit

Yes, it's kind of funny, i know people who had more than this only in mp3s already at that time.

Heh, I have about 180GB of just audio files (not all are MP3s, but still)

"home-brewed JPG photos..." Um, yeah, home-brewed.

@@GSVRemix I have 47GB of music just on my phone, and that's after transcoding from FLAC to MP3 so everything fits

*laughs in 85.1 GB of music*

Why?

Bruh

@@wta1518 I don't even remember, I do remember the reason I reinstalled XP eventually was because movie maker wouldn't work on ME though.

I have done that .. Removed win xp and went back to 2000 And windows ME. And I preferred win 2000 or 98se over windows xp anyday . . People that say I am crazy don't know that windows xp was very bad without the xp service pack 1 and 2. In fact it was so bad that I didn't install service pack 2 xp on my own pc until 3 years after its release . Win 98se and win 2000 was good enough.

I uninstalled xp to put back Windows 95 to get a bird hunter game working.

It’s the same story with vista, that’s why at this point i say windows vista is good and even nostalgic to some extent, I remember running windows vista RTM on XP hardware and it wasn’t that good, when the drivers for vista were available and SP2 came out it was much better

Same here as it goes, no major issues with it back in the day. I think we were the only two! 😄

Have you thought about a shorty story, or sending this to Hollywood?

That's some breaking bad $h!t right there

@Dave Volsky I skipped Vista altogether, went from XP to 7, then to 10

@Dave Volsky Vista ran slow for you because you tried putting it on XP machines. Vista on appropriate hardware runs just as good as Windows 7

Vista, I'd have a tough choice between that and Me as my most hated windoze version. I bought a brand new thinkpad that came with Vista, less than a week in I downgraded it to XP.

Ya that in itself was stupid. Really for the money. Let's just say it wasn't leaps like 3.x to 95.

Vista was necessary actually. Windows 7 wouldn't have been as good as it was if Vista hadn't failed in the first place. They needed something to improve upon with 7 or they'd have built it from scratch and it would've been much worse than it is now. In fact Windows 7 is just a simplified Vista, without all the extra features that slowed down Vista so much.

For me too. A lot better than 95 and a bit better than 98.

I used to work in computer retail from around the time Windows 3.0 released until shortly after XP released. I'd rather forget the Windows Me days. I had far more issues with Me systems than any other OS.

I had ME for a while and never had a problem with it. It's more or less Windows 98 with a pretty interface and 98 crashed often as well. I feel all of this is just an amplified meme for people born after Vista. I think it wasn't so much that ME was bad but rather that XP was so good.

Same. I guess most people didn't understand how to update their computer back then.

@@xmaverickhunterkx Update? :D I left the 'me' for 'xp', when I figured out that I don't need to restart the whole machine if the Unreal game map editor crashes. If I remember well, my SB16 compatible sound card worked better under me than under 98.

Marco Meijer In Italy it was known as Windows MErda which it means “Windows Shit”

In Thailand, we don't know this version of Windows exists. Probably for the better.

@@srk93332 In Brazil too, and I suspect the french might have given a similar nickname too

Ja dat weet ik ook nog wel ja.

Marco Meijer ook wel Windows Meuk Edition

What about the hard drive

@@me67galaxylife I haven't tried in awhile, but last time I checked the hard drive was still kicking.

@@hlavco that's pretty nice, perhaps one day you will put the thing back together ?

@@me67galaxylife Maybe, if I end up with an extra case to use.

@@hlavco that would be rad

They can if you're charging $200 for them.

@@boheyo true

@@boheyo or if the companies that price gouge the hell out of everything they sell cared about customer experience and not just milking us.

@Jay Greentree it also served to show a legitimate copy, sure, pirating windows is bad, but pirating windows and reselling it? thats much worse, no pirated copies ended up on holographic CDs

@@looneyburgmusic But is the $70 copy as gorgeous as the $200 one?

"It's a series of tubes.."

Cause they look a lot cooler than a bunch of transistors.

They were assuming you were playing Wolfenstein 3D on the Eniac, lol

Steam punk pc

Cause neeeerds :P

"Windows 9" (after Windows 8, I suppose) must have been skipped for some practical programming reasons, probably to do with the naming of the previous Windows versions that started with the number nine, such as 95, 98, and 98SE. There may have been marketing reasons to prevent confusion with Apple Mac OS 9 (System 9) and Plan 9 from Bell Labs. Further, Mac OS X ("X" for "10") had been out for quite a bit, and maybe Microsoft sought to keep up with that.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-jOh6Nh8w6f8.html

Ahahaha, that's a perfect joke!

Here's another joke. Well, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually not a joke but insider knowledge. xkcd.com/323/

The mysteriously treasure found in a mysterious dungeon somewhere would undoubtedly be more well received than just about anything from Microsoft these days.

@@adamgray1753 Definitely. Windows 2000 was cool though.

Yeah, it was, @@ltxr9973. Super stable too.

Until windows 8

@@ericelsberry5585 Amen brother

I called it Windows Blow ME.

Eric Elsberry No, Windows 8 is good if you modify it. Meanwhile Windows 10 is awful.

69 likes lmao

Billy should be around 26 y/o by now...

From uni with a computer science degree, probably. Breaking things and finding out what broke was how I learned.

Actually, he uploaded that masterpiece to LGR Blerbs. Just 2 minutes of quality filmmaking 😃

To be fair, that video made itself lol

The child and the ominous music, artistic gold.

... how in the fuck was that "scary"?

Imagine somehow watching that video clip before seeing the main video first like I did 🤣

The two things I remember most vividly about ME: - Playing Trance music with the aqua Night Lights visualisation on WMP7, still one of my favourite programs to this day. - That dumb kid wrecking a PC with a plastic hammer. It surprised me to know that ME was so infamous.

Revenant Same here. Was bummed when I had to upgrade.

Because you and Clint here loaded up ME in a sane way, with real drivers made for 9x. For you see, Me also advertised compatibility with a newer driver model (either the NT stack or something different, can't recall at the moment). Systems that shipped from OEMs frequently used both at the same time. The result was the flaming garbage dump that was most people's (mine included, hello 8 reboots a day) experience with this tragic OS.

I had no trouble, either. I wasn't building my PC at that point, but it was fine.

i've been blessed for most of my time since 95...only problems i had was with some drives back in those days but never really had any issues with anything else

My grandparents' computer (an emachines model of some sort) is also the only computer I've ever used that ran ME. I would visit them in the summer and had the same compatibility-related troubles too! 98SE was so much better. We skipped Me at home and upgraded straight to XP a few years later, but I had plenty of experience with this quirky mess of an OS.

@@ddogg14 At least ME had space cadet pinball for when you get too frustrated trying to troubleshoot compatibility issues!

@@viewtifuljoe99 True! I think I played more space cadet pinball on Me than I did on XP!

I had same experience back in the day. Windows me dont like to be messed arround much. 98SE seems more resilient.

Yep after we had to reinstall ME 3 times in a month we just ended up using Windows 2000 till XP’s first service pack came out

By OS rot you mean you never defragmented your hard drive? Because no hard drive keeps its performance after many installations and uninstallations without defragging.

@@MannyBrum No, I do not mean that. ME festered with a deeper evil than mere fragmentation.

When I ran several programs at once I would get a error about insufficient GDI resources. I liked the new look but I had to reinstall once a month.

The one and only machine (which I was given years after it's shelf-life) that I used ME on was a Gateway 2000 that had a Pentium III 800MHz CPU with passive cooling and no fans in the case. It froze up all the time. No wonder people hated ME; the hardware was crap and the OS got the blame.

​@@OzzFan1000 Maybe hardware was crap, but Win 98 and 2000 could handle it. Even Microsoft confessed the release was rushed and not properly tested, I remember rumors about how it was adapted from a very early prototype of Win XP that wasn't even close to consumer standards.

@@jongarzamx , I would still think that comes down to drivers. Windows 98 drivers needed to be re-written to a new standard and removing all support for real-mode access, which many manufacturers didn't bother to do. I'd wager that given a properly configured system, Win98, ME, and 2k would run fine side-by-side.

@@OzzFan1000 That does seem to be what this video shows...

@@ah5836 sounds like a precursor to what we have now. An application crashes and crash reports are sent to the vendor to be made aware of the problem and to develop a potential fix if needed. Sounds like Me's attempt was very much "version 1.0" Was Me flawed? I never said it wasn't. I just think it works better than most people give it credit for, as with Vista.

yea convince him, so i can fianlly procceed with the install

CHINA NO STEAL

You can get a complete boot cd image containing a dos menu where you can choose between windows me setup, a working cd key and a partition manager. The all in one iso which you can boot on your old pc and just install it. I don´t exactly know where i found this but i guess google will find it. The same exists for 98 se and 95 c. So the OS is more or less free anyways now.

Lol, nope they sure won't.

It's more a protective measure to ensure the unwary don't install it by accident

didn't 98SE do that too?

@@silkwesir1444 it needed a driver.

@@silkwesir1444 It's work with USB pretty well, but for mass storage it needs 3'rd party driver. Also frequently this driver contain "Safe eject" utility

ALL LIES!!!!

thanks for the replies. I wouldn't have known. The time I got into using USB thumb-drives I was already on Windows XP. Before that, it was CD-Rs and occasionally still floppies.

Nooooo kidding, this holds so much truth lol

I thought the same thing immediately not being an IT guy here. He got lucky from that install

and then Microsoft went and made in-place upgrade the preferred upgrade path for Windows 10 and everyone, long accustomed to the wipe and load still did wipe and load.

I'm sitting watching this having forgotten that I already watched it until I scrolled down and saw my comment lol. Yeah, at the time I made this comment, we were in the process of upgrading all of our company computers to Windows 10 from Windows 7, so when LGR mentioned doing the "in place" upgrade it caused a stir in my poor heart. Glad that's not my job anymore.

i.imgur.com/zh4F55R.png

Kym Busby ?

@@kymbusby Windows Cement - Only for end-users. Quite fitting actually...

"Hard as a rock, dumb as a brick."

And it ran on an Intel Celery Processor....

Same. On Windows ME at that hahaha

I laughed when I read this actually. Same happens to me when I play MX vs ATV on PS3. Hit the border and I go flying across the map.

The best part of the operating system! Spent so many hours playing it. I wish there was a copy out there of the game I could get. Worst part of the OS was that I couldnt install iTunes when I got my new iPod in mid 2005, had to borrow a friends laptop which had XP and not update my iPod for a year

Same here, although I think I only ever played the sequel, Motocross Madness 2. My brother and me played it to death, good times.

I forget this one even existed,i haven okayed that since like 1999.

y i k e s.

I remember that I refused to get Windows 98 when it first came out. I actually elected to have 95 OSR2 preinstalled on my K6-2-based PC. Looking back, I would have been better off getting 98 or 98SE preinstalled. But it wouldn't have mattered with my POS Diamond Stealth 3D 4000 video card... I skipped over 98 and ME to go with Windows 2000. XP was a joy to upgrade to (even on my Pentium III 933Mhz---after using. a forsaken Celeron 500Mhz). 2000 wasn't bad, but couldn't play many games on that.

Every week is a bit much. I averaged about 1 reinstall every 2 years for Windows 95 and 98, but I messed around with my computer a LOT. (at some point I was dual-booting NT4.0 with Windows 95) Windows XP I think I've reinstalled about 3 times in 15 years and it's almost always been tied to issues after transferring to a new hard drive. Windows 7 and up I can't say I've ever done a reinstall of (though I did once test it on a laptop I own then uninstall it and put windows XP back on. Nothing wrong with it, but I had gotten that license for my desktop which wasn't ready yet.), and I'm still using a computer from 2010 that runs a windows 7->10 upgrade. Though, that has given me a lot of grief over the years and right now windows update has been broken, and a dozen or so attempts hasn't been able to fix it, so... Might be time... (but I'm building a new PC soon anyway, so... Eh. I'll deal with it later.)

meanwhile, one of the computers I use at work has XP on it, and it gets rebooted maybe 3 times a year; other than that it's either on or hibernating... well, usually it's hibernating because I use a Linux machine most of the time; XP only when I need to use industrial software that requires windows

@@Bewefau Back when I used to use win98, I had a DOS utility that could make a compressed backup image of the c:\ partition. If win98 were to crash, or get eaten by a virus, or if I just totally broke it doing silly experiments (none of which happened often) I could reboot to DOS, type one command, and come back 2 minutes later to a fully-restored system.

@@KuraIthys I remember one time that I had managed to get a virus on my machine, and it turned out that there were very little information on how to remove it. The automated tools hadn't been updated yet and it kept reinfecting the machine with some kind of encrypted payload that looked different every time. After discovering that this virus it wasn't trivial to remove I toyed with the idea of reinstalling the machine, only to come to the conclusion that after more than five years of use the OS was so modified and tweaked that it would take a very long time to get it back to the functionality it currently had. So I grit my teeth and dug a bit deeper until I was able to identify, defuse and finally rip all it's components out of the system. I think it took me about 6 hours total, but by then I had a very good idea of how it worked. It might have been quicker to reinstall the OS, but then it would take something like six months or more before I'd have it up to speed again...

I used to love just pulling the plug from the wall on the work machines. Safe to turn off now ya bastard is what id say each time hahahaa

"it's now safe to turn off your computer" *GO SIT IN THE CORNER*

yeah

Win95

After I upgraded from 95 to ME, it no longer said it was safe to turn off my computer, the computer automatically shut down.

ok boomer

As far as I know, Windows is still using 1980s code and architecture. They paint over the creaking carcass with ever newer and shinier features that nobody ever asked for (transparent applications everyone!). And Win 98 was pretty good, was it not?

Yeaaah. Nostalgically resolving IRQ conflicts on soundcards... No, thank you.

@@camthesaxman3387 Claiming Amiga OS was more advanced & capable than Windows 95/98 is absolutely fucking ridiculous.... Your blind Amiga-fanboyness is blatantly apparent lol. Amiga fans and moderately delusional obsessiveness go hand & hand lol.

@@the81kid XP was a blend of NT and 9x, Vista was a rushed release of what Seven would be but AFAIK very much a rewrite to try and get rid of old crud. Permissions closer to UNIX and the likes. 8 even rewrote the UI system, and we all know how it went ; but from all that, I'd say Win10 probably has less legacy code than you'd expect!

vinyl reissue

Same. My first experience in editing videos and audio was with Windows Movie Maker on ME.

10gb?? my 486 had a 350mb hd which I compressed to have 512mb....!

Tiberian Sun, Roller Coaster Tycoon, Rainbow Six, Need for Speed,

I started with a 5 MB HDD.

@@alexandera.1411 Oh yes, we called those spaceships, I had a 10 mb mfm drive with my pc/xt/at compatible. and ofc., a floppy drive in the other bay..both were noisy critters. 🙂

@@tonyelsom6382 , mine was ES from Bulgaria, 5"25, which I had to reformat every other day owing to reocurring bad blocks. In a year, I upgraded that to a 10 MB ES (that is a brand). I also had a home 110 lbs printer, D-180. I cannot find any information on that model.

and

It means that this feature was working properly. ME was the first Windows with it.