Windows Millennium Edition - First Time using it - Good or bad? 

The joke going around at the time was that Microsoft was going to combine Win CE, ME, NT kernels and release "Windows Cement".

In my experience with using Win ME (back when it came out), it would run great for a while. I had few issues from a clean install. But over a couple of weeks of daily use, it would start getting sluggish and start giving me blue screens with increasing frequency. I used to keep an image of it and would restore it about once a month to keep my system running. Did this for a few months until I got sick of it and went back to Win 98 SE. That was far more stable than ME ever was.

Man, I loved me some ME. Of course Windows 2000 was the preferred choice during that time frame of Windows, but Windows 98 was more widely used by normal people until XP started gaining traction. Good times.

One of my best friends and I had very different experiences with ME and we were each running cheap Celeron eMachines at the time. His was an older P2 based Celeron (~500Mhz) and came with the first release of ME and he had all sorts of problems that I think most people who hated ME experienced. My machine was a slightly newer P3 based Celeron (~700Mhz) with a newer release of ME and everything ran great. So, people's experiences with ME may have been partly hardware related. The machine in this video certainly stomps on what either of us had at the time.

I agree, Windows ME was pretty much rock solid. I had it for quite a while on my old Pentium. Any errors it produced were easily repaired and usually involved a bit of registry editing and driver tweaking. It was 98SE with a modern feel and i liked it. I suspect that people who had a negative experience were indeed the upgraders from 98 --> ME. That took a long time to install and the results were not very good.

Great video Phil! Back in the day I was so tempted to install Windows ME but everyone advised me against it. I'm glad that, after all these years, people still care about that OS and it's actually not bad at all just like you showed here. I'm highly looking forward for the next videos.

Hi Phil, I'm not a gamer and I'm not into tech, but I enjoyed your video because my first PC back in 2001 had Windows ME on it. Blast from the past!

remember to disable defrag, older os doesn't recognize ssd

Hello! Thank you for using me! Even though I am no longer supported, it still feels good to have some company.

Mine was OK at first, then I had endless BSOD problems, even after bootup. XP was a MASSIVE improvement, very stable.

Really enjoying these videos. There's something really appealing about the aesthetic of early accelerated 3D. Particularly looking forward to the Kyro video.

Thanks for this series, Phil. That's about the time period I used my first self build PC. I used ME for some time and had the PC running over days, so the RAM ran full of garbage and it crashed alot. I did'nt have this problem with 98 before that and regretted the switch. Also there was a patch to end windows just like in 98 and go to DOS mode. Cheers from Germany.

Glad to see that this went pretty smoothly. It would be interesting to compare the same system on different OSes (Win98SE vs ME vs 2000 maybe?), but it would be a lot of work. great content as always Phil!

ME was always good on a fresh install, use it daily for a couple of weeks and you will start noticing problems!

Greetings from Portugal, fantastic, I loved this operating system. I have good memories of that time, including my personal life and, of course, I was less than twenty years old.

I loved Windows ME back in the day. I had very few crashes while it started and defragged quick as can be. And this was on AMD and VIA hardware, lol

I had WinME on my old P3-500 (originally a C400, but upgraded) with 768MB RAM. Tyan S1838S motherboard, Matrox G200 video card, SBLive, WD HDD. Adaptec SCSI card, 3Com network card, USR modem. CDRW, DVDROM, both FDDs. (This is VERY stable hardware. I have two of 'em, basically identical.) At first it couldn't even crash properly -- sluggish as hell and anything I did made it fall over, and it would take a good 20 minutes to finish crashing and burning. It never BSOD'd or quite totally froze up, but it would crash and unload one thing at a time, then cook for a long time before doing the next, and yes I timed how long it took to finally shut down. I applied 98Lite in default mode, disabled System Restore (this seems to be the most critical step), and applied the DOS boot patch (probably optional, and not really useful since the underlying DOS will not run any memory manager). Also avoided using the New Help as it's a goofy incarnation of IE and messes up RAM. And after that, WinME ran much faster and never crashed again. It got used for all the heavy lifting, multimedia, software testing, and backing up clients' HDs, and ran 24/7 for two years without so much as a restart. It only got replaced because I installed WinXP as a dual boot, and wound up using that instead (and XP did the same work, 24/7 for 8 years without a reboot, except for twice when the power was out longer than the UPS's capacity). Another positive was that when I was installing drivers, WinME was really good about grabbing the driver that worked -- in one case it wanted a Win95 driver; I let it do as it liked, and it worked fine. I have another copy of WinME on a loose HD (I think it originally came out of a Packard Smell) and it's been hooked to random motherboards without gagging; it's really good about rejiggering drivers as needed. The worst negative was that the resource heap management was totally broken. (Nero is a really good test for this; run multiple instances of Nero and see where the fonts go goofy -- that's when the resource heaps are depleted.) This meant visual issues when running several large apps at once, tho it never froze up, and apps almost never crashed. Performance was adequate but never snappy. Video playback could be notably laggy, but DVDs are right on the edge of that hardware's ability. This machine's twin had Win98OEM, and it was definitely faster than WinME, not to mention its DOS works properly. Also Win98 didn't have nearly as much problem with the resource heaps. WinME used about twice as much RAM, but the system had more than enough and I never saw it go above ~500MB, with swapfile disabled. WinME was never used for internet; unfortunate since Mozilla-based browsers are probably the buggiest software out there and are an acid test for any OS. But it worked well with Half-Life and a couple similar games. All in all, I prefer Win98, but once beaten into submission WinME is perfectly good for everyday, and probably a better choice if you need the OS to be portable since it's better at redoing drivers on the fly. When I was messing with Vista, I noticed that it shares a lot of the small quirks and visuals that marked ME, and it just feels the same in operation. I'm thinking Vista was worked on by the WinME desktop team (at the time Microsoft had two completely separate OS teams). I should add that both suffered from being shipped prematurely, and before I got WinME trained, when it crashed it would produce debug messages (not BSODs), which the user should never see ... indicating it was shipped as a debug build. Ooops.

I would really like to see a way to manage the SSD under these old systems (incl. XP) - explained in detail, like you always do :)

Windows ME is fantastic for a lot of reasons. It supports larger hard drives, it supports larger memory configurations, it supports more hardware and it supports USB flash drives out of the box. And, it still supports DOS stuff. I was (still am) a computer tech back in the days of this OS (and many years before it) and I loved ME for the improvements. A lot of people back then performed the "upgrade" which screwed things up. Also, a lot of people did not keep their BIOS (most didn't even know what that was!) up to date nor their drivers. So, you had a bunch of average users upgrading and having bad experiences. ME (and Vista) were fantastic operating systems for people in the know. For the rest it was a bad experience...and their voices unfortunately were the ones that stuck and dubbed these as "horrible" OSes. I run ME on my vintage PIII 750 rig and it is awesome. I play everything on it and then some.

Windows Me has been more stable for me than 98, always loved that OS.

I'm glad you had a good experience of Windows ME. I ran that once but I think most of my problems was because of the motherboard + VIA KT133 combination. Back in the early 2000's, a lot of mobos came with defective capacitors and unfortunately I had a couple of boards with those bad caps...an Abit KA7 and then a KT 7. Both boards ran fast but buggy as hell + the bad caps didn't help. Both boards died within 1 year or so after I built the computers. The VIA controller generated TONS of DMR CRC errors with Linux and even Win2000 showed lots of DMA errors. So I can imagine the hell ppl went through with the boards of the time coupled with Win ME.

Hi Phil! That hybrid 98/NT kernel rushed in a year was a literal monster and I LOVE IT! =D Very intruiging. The only OS that had my K6/2 500 play divx content without a hitch and outperforming 98 by miles. There's also a real-mode dos patch to "unhide" the regular 98 boot options.. no innovations there.

Thanks, Phil! I was dissuaded from using Windows Me by the many negative opinions/comments, but after watching you video, I just had to try it out for myself. My experiences: no blue screens so far, much faster startup and shutdown, way faster driver installation (less dialogs to click through etc.) - this is especially evident when installing the Intel chipset drivers; it flew by in comparison to Win 98. Installed on an SSD, everything feels super snappy. I'm never going back to 98, except maybe if I find a DOS game that I really want to play. Thanks again!

I'm just pleased everyone in this channel genuine know something about the OS rather than people just saying that because they've heard about it somewhere and want to blend in

excellent video like ever phil,im glad that you didnt have problems with windows me

I used to have Windows Millennium for a while, it was a nice system - was always giving me enough time to make a cup of tea (was booting so long) and when I was back it was greeting me with a bluescreen... Really great version, taught me to respect 98SE even more :) Great video though.

Yup , nothing wrong with Windows Me , especially with the unofficial service pack 1, which is just all the updates that were combined into a single pack. I only stopped using it in my videos becouse every time I did a video with Me in it I got thumbs down and people complaining about ME and telling me to switch to 98se ....

Wait you can press Ctrl+F1 on any Gigabyte BIOS and unlock more settings? How on earth did I not know this!!!

I still have windows millennium installed on my IBM Pentium 4 machine and it runs flawlessly ;) Thanks for this video, Phil! Cheers!

Back in the day, after windows 3.1, I had a Windows 98 machine. It was a constant source of irritation and needed infinite tweeks just to make stuff work. I upgraded to Me and it completely fixed everything and ran for years with no real incident. Conversely, I know people who had the exact opposite experience with Me, making their machines unreliable. Your mileage may vary.

We had a Compaq Presario 5000 series computer back in the day which came with Windows Me. We used that for many years back in the day, before upgrading to XP. It worked well, and Windows Media Player 7 with the Blue Flame visualization is powerfully nostalgic to me.

Driver support was one of the biggest gripes back in the day I worked for and OEM and we rarely supplied it due to most systems were built for corporate clients using NT4 workstation and Windows 2000. Win Me was meant to be a bridge for home users between windows 98 and XP. The interface was supposed to give the more modern look of Windows 2000 but due to driver support it was shunned. I personally skipped Win Me and ran Windows 2000 until XP was released.

Say, Phil, you can check all memory and tsr's by crawling through your win me install disc and us MSD.exe it will show a graphical interface and representation of UMB and page frame address availability.

I’ve been using WinME instead of 98 for a couple years now. No issues with my builds and games run great.

WinME supports right out of the box USB devices and can change network configs on the fly. That really helped me on the past.

Very good! Can you test Pentium Pro with Windows NT 4.0? I have worked with one (CAD / CAM) for years. I miss!

Thanks Phil, nice video. I never really understood all the hate for Windows ME. I bought it OEM at the time and installed it on my still running PIII-800E Slot 1, Asus P3B-F, V5 5500, which was the last PIII system I built. It has been a solid system for running that eras windows games. One thing I really love about Windows ME is the startup time is easily the fastest of any version of windows. My system boots in seconds. I was always amazed at that compared to Win 98 and Win2k. Of course this is partly due to the removal of real mode DOS. I think, as brought out, the drivers, or using the wrong ones, the lack of real mode DOS probably got it some hate. But I never really had any stability problems and I was supporting a lot of clients that had it installed with not any more complaints then any other version of a MS OS. I have that system set up right next to my Windows 7 system and via some registry hacks they are networked for share folders. All in all I look on WinME with fondness and think it is a great OS in the right hands.

I also remember having a quite decent experience with WinMe, save for DOS being tucked away a bit. Besides the initial issues with the drivers, WinMe had some other issues which contributed to it's bad rep, e.g. the System Restore not working. It was later fixed via Windows Update, but most people didn't update it and there was no official service pack for Me either. I personally never used System Restore, so it wasn't a problem for me.

Surprising to see an Axper. Had the Gigabyte version of your board (mine was named 7VT600-RZ). Unfortunately dumped it because not only it lacked SATA ports but also was very very picky about RAM. I replaced it with an ASUS A7V600-X, which works better, has SATA (including its own BIOS!) and more PCI slots.

Windows Me runs great on my Voodoo5 5500, Pentium III 1.4 and Live with an 815 board. Also running it with a 64gb Kingston SSD. Runs Glide, DX and OpenGL stuff great as well as DOS.

When WinME was super new OS from MS, i(and few my friends) had problems with IDE DMA, transfer rate from one HDD to another HDD was terribly slow, but all drivers were installed normally. With win98se IDE DMA worked with no problems and high transfer speeds.

When I used WinME back in the days on an AMD Duron 750MHz I just had some weird glitches that made me get a new OS eventually. For example, at one point my list of installed applications from Add/Remove Programs just vanished, never to be seen again. This never happened to me on any other Windows before or after. There were other small issues also, but it's been too long and can't remember anymore. My conclusion was that WinME will run ok at first, then it will start having small weird issues.

Bought a desktop from Best Buy in 2001 for the first time while in college, got home, hooked it up, pressed power, and BSOD before making it to the home screen. That's my first experience with Windows ME....... and pretty much every other time I tried turning it on.

Hey, Phil, heads up if you plan to use Starcraft/Broodwar in any more of your videos, do not update to patch 1.18! it's meant for newer OS systems and requires OpenGL 3.0 (not something found on older hardware). Wouldn't run on my PIII 1.4 with a GeForce 3, had to revert to 1.16 (no more bnet play for me on the old rig)

Hi Phil, very interesing video series. Perhaps I missed but you made no mention of the gotek floppy emulator besides you installed it, recently I got an internal one that came with a newer FW version, not sure which but the sticker says "SFR1M44-FUM-DL" and it behaves quite differently to what you show in your previous videos, have you had used newer gotek FD emulators with newer firmwares?

Phil, love your vids. How about a slot 1 vs. slot A show down?

I used to have ME on my PC for two weeks back in the days. I remember how I got crazy about the blue screens and incompatibilities and reverted back to 98 until 2000 came out.

I used Win Me up until late 2003 necer had any issues running anything DOS or Wibdiws .just used to set ganes to reatart in dos mode with their own config.sys & autoexec for each to avoid conflict's then resart back into win Me when your finished

Nice video as always. Happy to see ME worked out for you. I was really rooting for it because I use ME on my retro computer and I get a lot of crap for it haha I used the ERPman service pack, however I only used it to install the official updates and hotfixes.

I had to deal with Windows ME for quite a number of years when I was a kid and it's the only OS that I ended up getting a BSOD while already on a BSOD.

Thankfully,I only had to use windows me for around a week,Then i got Windows 2000 Pro which was absolutely solid,My favorite OS of all time!

It worked fine back when I had it on a Toshiba Satellite laptop from 2000. Used it that way for 4 years before it got XP and a memory upgrade. It wasn't noticeably more unstable than Windows 98 SE on the IBM desktop we had. I never used System Restore or any of those features though. I have no doubt the experience was probably a lot worse for those who bought at retail and upgraded existing machines.

Windows ME had a memory bug where it ended up crashing because of a memory leak after longer use and running different programs after each other. Windows98/98SE usually is the better option for 16/32 bit Windows retro gaming 98/Me style as this memory leak isn't present in Windows 98/SE. The missing MS-DOS acces doesn't need to be a big issue as you could re-enable MS-DOS, which still runs underneath but access to it is prohibited from the interface by default. When you Google ' enable ms-dos on windows me ' , remove the ' ' s the first link shows a page with an how to.

What were the boot times like after you had everything installed?

I used ME when it first came out and I remember so many issues with drivers and BSODs. So yeah, almost 20 years of updated drivers does help a bit lol

There are some .0033 beta drivers from 2004 Phil, that bring simulated hardware T&L for the kyro, which may be of interest. They may introduce other bugs though.

I can remember at the time that I used ME for ages with no issues at all, ever. A lot of my mates however could never get it to remain stable.

I'm curious how well Windows XP 64bit runs today. I would enjoy a video on that.

Buying up all Kyros I can get my hand on :). Glad it gets some love. Btw why are all my cards Hercules made (2xKyro1 and hopefully a 2 will be confirmed tomorrow)? Phils as well...

Some tips for performance on Athlon and Athlon XP machines, Command rate for RAM is best set a 1T and best also to use dual channel so 2 sticks, especially on newer boards, and also running the memory as fast as it will run so 200mhz (effective 400mhz) but thats more for faster CPUs like the 2500+ and higher, VIA chipsets around the KT266-KT800 series can be hit or miss with AGP issues and other quirks, but the KT600 and KT800 should be fine. Back in the day and even now I've not had any major problems with Windows ME other than the DOS support being not so good.

I've only had negative experiences with ME due to motherboards that I've had issues with in the past (such as my repaired Jetway 994AN-L which seems to scramble the bootsector of any OS installed on any HDD-meaning that I need to use a boot floppy, or CD in the case of Windows 95-ME) Edit: Turns out that its not the board at fault, but connector 1 on the IDE cable for the HDD.

I've installed ME on a VIA KT133 chipset. That's one of the buggy chipsets you mentioned. It froze. all. of. the. time. No revision of the Hyperion driver would help the experience under ME on this board. Installed XP on that machine which fixed it. 98 wasn't an issue either. This has been the only circumstance WinME caused issues for me though. On every other hardware platform it ran just fine.

I used ME for years, and it worked pretty well for me. I used 95 until the lack of USB support became a problem, then tried 98 (yikes), and shortly after, 98SE (better, but still fragile.) When ME came out, I moved to that quickly and stayed there until XP. I did try 2K for a short while, but it was too heavy for my system at the time, and driver support was still lacking. I don't know if the ME hate is luck of the draw with hardware and drivers, or just bandwagoning. AFAIC, it's 98SE, more stable and more polished, with a preview of 2K's grown-up / business-friendly style, and support for new features. I did have one install of ME go badly after the first trip to Windows Update. I ended up having to reinstall, and then it went fine. Nothing I hadn't been through with 98SE though. I'm pretty sure I got into a few scuffles with 98's Active Desktop and IE and had to go scorched earth on it as well. That kind of thing was just normal PC life until about halfway through XP's tenure.

I never had issues with M.E.. I used it with a 500 Mhz AMD k6 on a soyo board. I honestly dont think I ever had a single crash. It was great.

Google "WinME memory leak" and news articles will surface. I also remember an old stability tip with setting the pagefile to a 2nd partition to prevent it corrupting.

Great video Phil, So in your opinion would you rather build AMD or Intel. It seems like The AMD is pretty fast, would love to see if it beats the Pentium III

even these days, if you use the well at least in windows 7 create a DOS boot disk, actually, I have a bootable USB that I made especially for using to update intel MBs...it still boots to WindowsME command prompt.

I found ME was fine with a fresh install and there were no major issues...for the first few months... But after that I always had issues with stability and performance, it was like the install would get messed up after a few months and the only thing that fixed it was a fresh install. I first started using a secondary HD for this very reason as I cannot count the number of reinstalls I did with ME! I'm very interested to see if Phil has the same problems or if I was just one of the unlucky ones whose system components/ drivers ran foul of ME

Great video Phil. I think it's safe to say that a lot of people watching this will have a big rethink about WinMe. What I am interested in is how does it go with more than 512mb ram installed. Even with patches win98se is dodgy with more than 512mb. Some later games like Doom 3 (cracked exe to run on win98) might benefit from 1 gig or more. Maybe later some benches with a more common video card for comparisons sake too.

Just a question.. does TRIM work on that SSD ? if so what did you do to make it work ? Nice video by the way. I never used winMe or Vista but I did use dos 3.0 to dos 6.2 (I think), win 2000 pro, win 2000 server, win xp pro, win 7 pro. I have worked on peoples computers that had win8, win8.1, win10 I am not a fan of windows10 the GUI and the way MS pushed it was wrong and they killing updates for windows 7 on new hardware is nasty as there is no mention in the EULA on the processor cutoff only the minimum requirement. Win10 is has a good kernel but the backed in spyware is not on..

I use win ME for audio production in early 2000 for several years before i switch to XP in 2004... i personally think it works for me.. i swtch to XP because i need more RAM.. (still use win XP until now for my recording /Composing PC since i spend a fortune for them and they still work rock solid)

once you patch WinME and tweak it properly, it generally works no worse or better than Win98 as you said, there are similarities to the vista situation , I ran WinME back in 2001 and it was a mess, with constant crashing and BSODs. between bad/early drivers, immature chipsets , not enough RAM and running a bunch of devices (we aren't running printers, scanners, modems, etc), alot of computers crashed and burned with ME.

I had Windows ME on a laptop back in the day, horrendously unstable. It often crashed on me which was annoying. After installing Windows 2000 Pro I never had a problem since.

AWESOME! Loved it!

Windows ME and Vista used to be my favorites back in the day.

I never had any issue running ME back in the day.

Can anyone explain why old Windows 3.1 window gadgets appear sometimes such as at 2:03?

Even with all the issues i had in the past with ME, something nice about old 90s operating systems that i cant explain :p

what is the interface of the ssd that you installed Windows ME on? i saw you disabled the ide adapter of the motherboard

People don't like Dell, but they still have the manuals and drivers available for some really early laptops, and even still keep track of the service tags on 486 machines, possibly even earlier!

Hi Phil, I've recently acquired a Pentium 4 which i've put 98SE on. You mentioned drivers for DOS, are these necessary if so where can I download them?

Sometimes I got a BSOD in my WinME while recording TV show with Windows Movie Maker, and the whole record were gone.

i upgraded to Windows ME on my 2 old retro pcs. that was running Windows 98 SE. specs are : Pentium 166 MHz 256 MB of ram and 10 GB hdd. and my other retro pc : Pentium 233 MHz 96 MB of Ram 40 GB hdd (32 gb bios limit). works fine and no problems at all. Windows ME standard drivers does not give sound in dos games.but after download the windows 95 VXD sound drivers for the soundblaster 16 ISA. then you get sound in dos games. the standaard WDM Drivers that come with Windows ME does not give sound in dos games for some reason.

How did you install Windows ME on a SATA SSD. You need a F6 driver to do so and Windows ME does not have one. Windows 2000 and Windows XP have a F6 driver and give you the option to install it when you install the OS. Windows ME does not have that option.

As far as I remember, I had the same results on Win Me - no issues at all. K7S5A with Duron 700 MHz - stable as rock :P. I wanted to stay on Win98 (dos mode) but... I had blue screen all the time. So it was Me time for me :)

Aren't axper mobos just rebranded Gigabyte? Seems so in this case - the XP-K7V600 is basically a GA-7VT600-RZ.

I can remember using Windows ME on my very first desktop that I built myself back like in February or March of 2001. It had a Pentium III 1.0 ghz, 256 mbs of pc133 ram, NVidia Geforce 2, and a 40 GB hard drive. I remember in that same year was when I first used AOL dial-up. Of course before selling that PC, I upgraded it to XP.

No offense, I know ME was the most hateable OS since it just 2000 with 9x kernel. But what I learn from Science Elf, it actually was a side project. Plus, it was my childhood OS, and it works really awesome. Got no BSODs so far at least on my old Dell Latitude laptop...

Phil, I want to know more about the PCI to SATA controller. Could you please make a video about it running on a P3 with ISA? Thanks!

Best Service Pack? AFAIK when I tested NT 4.0 Workstation back in 2014, Windows Update still ran and installed SP6 just fine. I assume you tried Windows Update? I feel like Microsoft still keeps those servers running. Or do they just not have anything anymore for ME?

I don't understand how you got Windows ME to recognize the SATA SSD drive.

Test Kyro in 32 bit color, because at that is fast almost as GeForce. In 16 bit color is slower.

For some reason I remember WindowsMe had a different interface/theme compared to Windows 98.

I think I was one of about 3 people on the entire planet that had a generally positive experience with WinME. I didn't know much about computers at the time so it was pure luck that it was more stable than my previous 98SE OS.

I actually originally used Windows ME on my first gaming PC that I built in early 2001. It had a 1 GHz Pentium III CPU. I then later upgraded it to Windows XP in 2002.

You fulfilled my request!

Cool video. Millennium Edition was very much made for OEMs with specific multimedia hardware (even then there was no guarantee of a stable system) even though there were retail versions for sale so yeah - no wonder people had lots of problems. I like your cautious approach and using as latest drivers as possible. I'd like to see it compared to Windows 98SE benchmarks like you are planning. Looking forward to more videos. :)

The only problem with Windows ME is that if you have an S3 Trio 64v+ and you want Vesa 2.0 you can't use S3vbe20.exe with it due it's a DOS program. You have to download a program called Me2Dos/DOS2ME (think that what its called) to let you enable Config.sys and autoexec.bat files to work. himem.sys and emm386.exe don't work in this mode though but if you need those TSR running, then you need to do this to Windows ME.

Me was my favourite lots of wallpaper screensavers etc that 98 didn't have

This is pretty cool. I just installed ME on an Athlon64... meh. It was cool to do and play with but ultimately, Win98SE or WinXP w/DOSBox is the way to go with a permanent system. I was hoping that it would solve issues I have using flash drives but I think it is an issue with all Win9x and the onboard USB 2 ports.