Windows Me: The WORST Version of Windows 

Lmao

My OSes were: XP, 7, 8.1 and now 10

@@mica7191 Mine were MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, 3.11, 95, Me, XP, Vista, 7, 10, and 11. For some reason, by hard drive didn't like 8, so I skipped that one.

@@BrentJohn hum... I might consider 11 as well... with registry edits... got an i5-4460

@@BrentJohn DOS 6.22? I also tried OS2 for a week.

Omg! Project IGI? I remember that game!

Good times!

My family's first computer was a Gateway running ME when I was a kid. Even though we knew pretty much nothing about computers when we bought it, we all learned really quick how to boot into safe mode and do system restores, because the OS would fail catastrophically about once or twice a month and that was the only way to fix it haha. My dad has always been super cheap, but he gladly bought a whole new machine with XP on it just a year or two later and we put that Gateway on the curb with no regrets. In retrospect we probably would have been fine just downgrading it to Win98, but none of us knew how to do that at the time

@@shoego they are coming back with new igi game titled origins after 20 years

Some of the computers in my school ran Windows ME, and students logged onto their user accounts from a domain. They were slow because the laptops were sluggish, but the operating system did the job. There was no issues with Windows ME in a corporate environment other than it not being on the NT kernel. I also have a Dell Dimension 8100 which runs Windows ME pretty well. The moment we upgraded to Windows XP Home Edition, the computer started crashing and none of the DOS applications functioned. Oh, and the Home doesn't have the ability to log into a domain which is absolutely unacceptable.

And now people adopting W11 are the unpaid beta testers History repeats itself or something along those lines

Agreed. ME is so terrible.. My favs are XP, 7, 10

XP was only great compared to ME. In hindsight it was pretty bad too until SP2.

Yet they have got rid of all the testers for windows 10 and 11

Windows Me was a startling success compared to Windows 3.x. It would run out of x86 segmented 16bit DOS memory because it was x86 segmented 16bit DOS memory. Any application that used a lot of memory made it so that you needed to reboot more often. Heavy tasks like development, database management, complicated office documents, etc etc... It's why I used the DOS AOL client as a kid. Few people knew about the DOS AOL client and even fewer still actually used it, but since it was based on the little known GEOS desktop environment libraries it ran silky smooth and stable. Literally the only reason Windows 3.x became popular is because Microsoft had a great marketing and licensing program to get it to ship with OEM PCs.

Good to know. Yes, XP was fanTASTIC!

How were the unleaked Whistler builds like?

@@jhj681 the commenter literally said that he was Beta-Testing XP. Wdym?

Did that exact thing with Vista. Ran the 7 beta starting in early 2009 because it ran so much better than Vista on the same hardware. Prior to that, I had given Vista every shot I could before finally reverting to XP.

Same, it's just that I'm most probably a bit younger than you xD

same

Lmao same story as many Linux users, different conclusion x)

I have had a similar situation but with hardware instead of software, I used to have this old PC from 2007 that was absolute garbage, the computer was litteraly almost the same age as me since I was born in 2006. Dealing with that computer taught me a lot about hardware and sometimes I kinda miss it haha. It made me love working with computer hardware and now I plan on going to college and do some Computer Hardware Engineering

I had ME as a teenager - on a Pentium 60 with a VESA card and a Maxtor hard disk. 12 Mb RAM too. That was sooooooooooooooooooo much fun!!!

So team one made 98, Xp, 7, and 10, and team 2 made ME, vista, 8, and 11.

@@pengil3 No, actually, I was thinking of earlier releases, ending at Vista.

I always thought it was that the lemon team came up with the ideas for the OS but had no technical knowledge to make it workable (ME, Vista, 8), whereas the good team took the ideas from the lemon team and actually made it usable (XP, 7, 10). Now it's come to Windows 11 both teams seem to have merged as it's an OS that has both good ideas and is useable. A miracle!

@@andrewwebb3431 That makes more sense than my speculation.

I used to say back around 2005 that Microsoft's Windows release cycle was good, bad, good, bad (specifically referring to 9x). That works with the idea of two different teams working on alternate releases. 😂

same, I used to watch the whole video when installing it ... still have the audio clip from there on my phone as an alarm

Did you upgrade to ME from a previous version of Windows or just install it fresh? Seemingly more people have issues because they "upgrade" to OSes that weren't supposed to be on their hardware. It's unfortunately an issue that persists to this day.

I also adored the NT platform, IF YOU CAN AVOID DOS PROGRAMS!

Use 98SE people.

@@carltonleboss thanks. I'll keep that in mind if i ever wake up in 1999

98SE had the flash drive support that ME's being credited for, so it wasn't *that* bad

@@carltonleboss Lmao I also remember 98SE having a much better reputation, to the point where people would compare it to windows XP (they were wrong).

Windows 98 SE was very decent for its time. People like to repeat what they hear on youtube, especially younger ones who didn't even use it when it was around.

I had a pretty rough experience compared to 95 at the time but It's actually ridiculously solid on more modern hardware, I've got a circa 2004 pentium 4 3.0ghz HT that still runs ME flawlessly, it's the oldest shit I got that still supported ME out of the box. Awesome for 16 bit games

ME worked great for me as well. It's the only version I ever purchased. At least it until the days of cheap gray market OEM licenses.

I liked ME too. I had a pentium 3 laptop that ran it pretty well.

I liked ME too. Never had a problem with it.

#MEtoo

this is way above "home users" understanding like IE5 from '99 allowing all that HTML5 can now do like text shadows and image mirror that W3C allowing netscape(lol), chrome, and opera in window7 to finally do what windows 98 could do... IE5 and free geocities websites allowed things people are just now getting back into with web design today... ActiveX filesystem access, DirectX css filters, css expressions, java applets, etc allowed way more in a browser than we can do now...

Billy Coore from The Nostalgia Mall?

Been wondering how would it be if I paired my Celeron E3400 with a lower end GPU... instead of a GMA X4500 onboard granny

@@myk1_sp No, the Billy who got pied.

I have that same issue in Windows 10. Have to manually delete everything in the temp folder to improve log-in\loading times.

It didn't differ from 95 and 98 that much, did it?

@@carltonleboss hardware/software constant failures, and not recognizing simple things was horrendous+alot of people had lots of mouse stutter. Reinstalling it multiple times actually fixed some driver issues for some people I knew at the time, and if they needed help we would do a backup and full reinstall till some drivers would just start working, lol. Sometimes there was no way around it.

@@carltonleboss It had 'system restore' which previous windows did not have. I found that was the cause of nearly 100% of any issues I had. Disable system restore and any performance issues and errors disappeared. Wish I had an old PC and ME so I could make a video on this. Because I've not seen a single "ME BAD" videos by 'tech experts' ever cover this. Probably because many of them these days don't look old enough to have ever actually used it themselves lol.

Who else remembers NewShell for Windows 3.1 that made 3.1 feel like 95?

People have hardware which wasn't compatible with Windows ME. Also booting into DOS was removed. My Dell 8100 worked fine with Windows ME. It started becoming terribly unstable when we upgraded to XP Home.

ME is still worse, but 11 have many "features" that you would only find in machines infected with malware back then.

Windows 11 is Just as a good as Windows 10 even better in some aspects

I would assume it’s due to Windows 2000 being intended to be used in a business environment rather than for home use. (Since Microsoft knew that making their business customers run the DOS-based 9x systems would be a huge liability) From what I’ve read there were people who moved to 2000 out of frustration with ME. But yeah thankfully XP finally put the DOS-based windows systems out of its misery.

I had the same thought why Win2k so often gets missed. It ran most games just fine and was plenty stable.

@@TheMrDeeJay I did drop ME for 2000 on a laptop and never looked back. It was rock stable, but it gave a performance hit in games if they did run. Also, it had complete usermanagement, which was something you had to learn to deal with. AND not every piece of hardware came with NT/W2000-drivers, so it wasn't always possible. In XP almost all those headache where gone, and it was better usable for non-tech savvies..

I guess because you needed about 64MB RAM to run it, which was quite a lot at the time. I ran it, and it was a massive improvement over 98.

Windows 2000 was one of my favourite Windows versions, massively underrated. I never even loaded ME and went straight to 2000. Never liked the 9x series much it was a poor design technically

Same problem today. 98% of people using PC's have no idea what they're doing. You could apply that to almost all tech. Even the 'pro-gamers'. Anyone can build a new pc now, but still very few go beyond the basics. Back then shit wasn't so plug n play. The trick to Windows Millenium was to disable system restore. Had a Pentium 133 16mb ram and 2 Voodoo 2's in SLi and it benchmarked better with WIndows ME than it did with 98 after I turned off system restore which really seemed to slow the system down.

@@TheCunningStunt That's good information to know, thank you for mentioning this!

mine too, and I still have to use it because some systems at my workplace run it...

me could agree but 11 is not 2nd worst - you probably havent used 98 and Plung and Pray when bluscreens where normal everyday activity

the specs are probably to stop people running Windows 11 on their core 2 duo laptop from 2007 and complaining about how slow it is

who cares about the worst, all of them are worse than the windows 7, the best windows of them all yet, but vista is considered the worst for me personally because the specs jump from the prev version is the most notable one, and it changes my favorite pipes screensaver to a bunch of drunk person riding tron bikes that lags my pc, and a lot of crashes on my system

@@mukyumukyun windows 7 is amazing, although I would say 10 is the best when it comes to UI/UX or customer experience.

I'd agree more if you said windows 10, compared to 8.1 the then new start menu was awful (looks wise and somewhat usability wise) in comparison to the start screen and live tiles really only shined on Windows 8.1, on Windows 10 they were just blobs of whatever theme color you chose

They were still making cheap laptops with 486 processors until 1998 or 1999. The 486 lasted alot longer than many people think, maybe in part because uptake was slow when it first arrived in 89 and then even though the Pentium came around in 1993, many people found 486 systems a cheap upgrade from their 286 and 386's , whereas the Pentiums were initially expensive and also buggy. Also the internet in the 1990's was slow, mostly static pictures and didn't push anyone's PC unlike the modern web.

you mean.....56.6K?

2000 was great.

you could buy win2k - worked really well. less game support though most worked fine, and for those that still needed dos, could dual boot with a small Win9x partition. Win2k was a great os :)

I ran Rad Hat Linux 5.0, 5.1, and 5.2 back then. Want a GUI? I was able to get XFree86 working(X Windows), but I don't think I got it working until about a year after I started using Linux. So, 1998. Back then not too many had X Windows up and working, but it was certainly possible!

I'll say it as many times as I can. Windows Millenium was waaaaay better than 98 and previous Windows. Once you disabled the new at the time system restore. See it still today, every time a new Windows come out the peasants who don't know what they're doing instantly hate on it because 'reasons'. Reasons being new things are scary and people don't bother to read manuals and learn how to use the tech they use.

Look for the Maximus Decim USB drivers. He took the WinMe USB drivers, put them in an installer for Win98SE. With that installed, any USB device that just works in WinMe will do the same in 98SE. Someone else did the same to make the WinMe USB drivers work in Win98 original, but who wants to run that garbage? 98SE was far better.

@@greggv8 I've used those. Extremely useful. Flash drives when they first came out were rather a pain to use on Win98 since you couldn't use the flash drive to transfer the driver (for that specific flash drive, no less) to the machine and Win98 didn't have built in drivers (probably predates the device class spec). So, you needed some other way to get the driver on the machine so you could use a flash drive. In particular though, I was referring to MDGx's "KILLER REPLACEMENTS: ME → 98 SE". It appears Windows ME had lots of components that got bug fixes and improvements. And those can be grafted onto Win98se.

@@ccoder4953 I'd like to find old software called 3D FAX. It could encode any file to a series of 2D "barcode" TIFF images then FAX them. The recipient could get them with a modem and 3D FAX could decode direct from the images or if the recipient had a FAX machine the printouts could be scanned. Computer files could be stored on paper in a file cabinet.

@@greggv8 I'm sure you could find that on some abandonware site, but, honestly, why would you want to? The data density of something like that is going to be absolutely awful. We're talking filing cabinet to store a CD type stuff. I get you might want some sort of long term archive. But, if it's text, just print out the plaintext. That should be readable as long as the paper and ink doesn't degrade. If it's data, properly stored tapes can have quite good lifetimes. There's also this thing called Millenniata or M-disk. If you believe their accelerated life testing, they are supposed to have very long lifetimes (hundreds of years). They need a special writer, but can be read in any normal drive.

@@muneebrehman6288 "Windows 2000 … lacked in gaming capabilities" Did it? I don't remember that, I was playing games all thru that era and don't remember being constrained by the OS. Win2000 had DirectX 7, 8, 9 thru its life, which should have made if pretty games capable. "Windows 2000 was the server version of windows ME" Hmm, I thought 2000 was the 'friendly' face of NT-not part of the 9X series like ME. 3 of the 2000 SKUs were server-oriented, but the Professional SKU was aimed at individuals-but somewhat tech savvy people it's true, I do recall some under the hood stuff to get it the way I wanted it. XP then essentially tried to marry 2000's reliability and security with Me's/9X's ease of use, and eventually succeeded with Service Pack 3 around 2008-and of course succeeded hugely a year later with the superb Win7.

Pretty much the same on my Siemens Nixdorf Laptop with ME (except if I did something stupid ofc)

I was foolish enough to pay over $100 for a full retail, boxed version of ME. I backed up everything, wiped the drive, and installed it. As I began installing drivers, I discovered that there was no ME driver for my $400 Epson Stylus 700 photo printer. I installed my regular Win98 driver, and it would not work. I called Epson support, and as soon as the words "Window ME" came out of my mouth, the guy on the phone said, "Oh." I asked if there was an ME driver, and he said no. I asked when they would have one, and he said they would not be supporting ME. Shocked, I asked why not? He said, "Keep using it, you'll see." I went back to 98SE in about two weeks.

I just went back to 98SE. After that I used Win2000 SP4 for gaming until WinXP SP1. SP4 allowed DirectX installation.

I guess you had cracked windows 2000 since it wasn't for home users

@@namesurname4666 would simply be impossible to use a professional OS at home

Yes 95 was light years ahead of 3.1 (98 was a small upgrade), XP was light years ahead of ME and 95/98 Windows 7 was light years ahead of XP, Vista and 8 forget about it lol. Windows 10/11 is good but not as revolutionary as Windows 7 was and I still miss AERO.

It was probably something else. If you installed MS Windows, AND NOTHING ELSE, there wasalmost always no problems. But usually the reason you install Windows is because of some other software that you want to install and run. After installing some other programs back then, I could boot up Windows 95 and sit there and watch it for two minutes, and it would just crash... all on it's own. Then again, it wasn't exacly all on it's own, it was because of another program that was running in the background. But this program was supposed to have been made for Windows 95! It was enough to make me pull my hair out. I moved over. I moved over to Red Hat 5.0, 5.1, and then 5.2. After that I was a Debian Stable guy for many years. Now I run Garuda Linux and Debian Siduction.

Yeah it would BSOD just listening to music in Windows Media Player.

It's funny - in 8.1Pro (I use it right now), it boots directly to desktop. I can get into metro if I need to - and frankly, Metro's second screen (not the live tiles) is one of the best ways I have ever seen to locate installed applications and programs. If they had release 8.1 for desktops/laptop and just restricted 8.0 to mobile devices - people would be begging to keep win 8.1. But folks didn't ever get to 8.1 after trying 8.0.