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Is ME really that bad?


IceFairyAmy

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I've tried ME in a virtual machine and while I know that isn't the true experience as compared to running it on real hardware, is there a reason why so many people reported issues with it (like Vista) - was it buggy drivers or such thing like with Vista? As well as the fact it was superseded in under 500 days by XP's release, what made ME so bad, and why are there people out there that do praise it if it was considered to be unstable? I've noticed it running fine with 512 MB of RAM on a single-core CPU emulation in VMWare with the tools installed...

 

What I can tell from it is that it is more or less like 98 SE with a few new features and MS-DOS real mode being hidden.

Edited by IceFairyAmy
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IMHO there is a big difference between Windows ME and Vista.

As a matter of fact Windows ME is - as you say - very similar to 98 SE (with actually a few betterings "under the hood").

The issue was that it removed (or made difficult) to an audience coming from 9x a large part of their experience (MS-DOS in real mode) while introducing quite a few incompatibilities (particularly with DOS based programs, but not only), and the betterings were not easily detectable to the end user.

As a matter of fact, the "best" system is most probably a 98SE2ME:

http://www.mdgx.com/9s2m/

http://www.mdgx.com/98-5.htm#KRM9S

Of course XP (particularly the XP Home pre-installed on laptops) killed it (while providing - on the very limited hardware on which it was installed - a poor experience to the user anyway).

Vista is a different case, it actually sucked, and it sucked big initially.

A number of (senseless) changes were introduced on the otherwise perfectly working NT derived XP, and it was delivered in a severely immature stage, while no or very little documentation was provided.

Besides (the same) issues with low-powered entry-level systems where it came pre-installed, the real deal breaker was that it was widely publicized as the "new better" OS (understandably from MS point of view) without highlighting how the hardware requirements were extremely higher than what XP ran on.

The net result was that everyone that had XP running tried it (either on the same old hardware where they had XP running just fine or as a pre-installed OS on low-low power notebooks/netbooks) and the result was of an extremely slow OS (additionally with a lot of issues with permissions, network and drivers).

It was doomed, everyone that could remained on XP, at least at the times of "gold" and - later - "SP1" (which only partially fixed the issues) came out.

The actual working version of Vista (from a certain point of view even better than 7) was SP2 which simply came too late and was "killed" by MS itself and by the release of 7.

The latter was also IMHO greatly facilitated by the progresses of the hardware in the meantime, an entry level system in 2009 was far more powerful than an entry level system in 2006 or 2007, and this is one of the reasons why 7 (which I like to call Vista SP3) actually had so much success.

BOTH Vista and 7  are resources hogs (when compared to XP or even better 2K) what made the difference was the sheer power/speed beneath. 

jaclaz

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My Dad used to use ME, he said Me was rock solid and a stable O/S and his most favourite O/S at the time. Many times like Windows 8,Vista And Me Most of the negativity spreads from people who never used the o/s and just read some random guy commenting that "Windows 8 is Bad" "Windows Vista Laggs and Sucks" and so on.

In real
Windows 8 is decent if you ever used it
Windows Vista SP2 Probably Faster than Win7
Windows ME Better than Win2k? Not As Unstable as people say but it did lack a few features from 98SE 

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@Burd:

Thank you for chiming in.  I didn't want a negative view of Vista to be the standing complete one.  Yes initially there were major display diver and disk I/O problems  But those were fixed, and by SP2, was a dream to run.  Jaclaz does say this in fact, but it's kinda buried under the criticism.

Vista and 7 aren't resource hogs in the modern sense of the word.  It is no longer (in my mind) unreasonable to need 4 GB of RAM and a good CPU to run a modern-day OS.  They do more under the hood to make a single task more stable and secure (when everything is setup correctly). I've come to realize that the component store, while not efficient is ACTUALLY A GOOD IDEA, pretty much ridding of DLL Hell.  And I've come to realize that it's OK that a modern-day OS take up 10 to 15 GB to do its job properly.  Comparing to XP is not valid because (again in my mind) it should be in the retirement home resting.  It is NOT a modern OS, whereas Vista, even though it's a decade old, does represent a modern OS.

:)

 

 

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1 hour ago, jaclaz said:

Vista is a different case, it actually sucked, and it sucked big initially.

You know better than that.... LoL .... You are going to start a war for being politically correct. Never really got the chance to play with Vista but have heard many compare it to Windows ME. WinME did have some nice features that was lacking in Win98/SE.

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Ok. :)

A set of numbered statements.

1) Vista sucked (and sucked BIG), both when released and with SP1.

2) The actual working version of Vista (from a certain point of view even better than 7) was SP2 which simply came too late and was "killed" by MS itself and by the release of 7.

3) Vista is a resource hog (measured with the ONLY possible point of view, the performance on the entry-level hardware of 2006/2007 where it was pre-installed at launch time and with what Microsoft gave as basic requirements)

4) 7 is a resource hog just like Vista, after all it is Vista SP3+ (but, measured with the point of view of 2009 or later hardware it is harder to notice)

5) Obviously today, in a time where most basic hardware is at least 3 times faster than 10 years ago, maybe even faster, particularly if we include a SSD, the hogging of resources goes totally unnoticed, this is not a merit of the OS, it is the merit of the hardware.

 

@Burd you cannot even think :w00t: of comparing Windows ME with Windows 2000, because they represent two completely different branches of the OS, the DOS based family vs. the NT family, and - besides this- the actual "good" parts of Me came from 2K, but more than that, at the time the good MS guys (correctly) differentiated users between "home" (to which Me, like 98, was targeted) and "business" or "pro" (to which 2K, just like NT 4.00 was targeted).

jaclaz

 

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Simplyfying, ME was a DOS- based beast without an easily-accesible DOS underneath, and no changes and improvements NT-based systems provided.

Generally, Judging the system by the few moments with VM is not applicable, you have no way to get the experience and problems people had with it those days.

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ME is OK as I still use it as my sole desktop OS those days. ;)

This said I have a couple of laptops with Win 7 (I hate that OS) which I use only when I need to do one of the two things I can't do with ME and that is making a payment on the Paypal website or downloading something from Mega.


 

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13 hours ago, JodyT said:

@Burd:

Thank you for chiming in.  I didn't want a negative view of Vista to be the standing complete one.  Yes initially there were major display diver and disk I/O problems  But those were fixed, and by SP2, was a dream to run.  Jaclaz does say this in fact, but it's kinda buried under the criticism.

Vista and 7 aren't resource hogs in the modern sense of the word.  It is no longer (in my mind) unreasonable to need 4 GB of RAM and a good CPU to run a modern-day OS.  They do more under the hood to make a single task more stable and secure (when everything is setup correctly). I've come to realize that the component store, while not efficient is ACTUALLY A GOOD IDEA, pretty much ridding of DLL Hell.  And I've come to realize that it's OK that a modern-day OS take up 10 to 15 GB to do its job properly.  Comparing to XP is not valid because (again in my mind) it should be in the retirement home resting.  It is NOT a modern OS, whereas Vista, even though it's a decade old, does represent a modern OS.

:)

 

 

being lightweight is first criteria of a modern os.

Who said XP is not modern ? Their are millions of modern stuffs that XP run but Vista . NO artificial blocking , VIsta lacks those technology where as  7 fixed some of them .

Until the day a os can do its job at maximum performance for the time being 2017 then no one has right to say it old or ancient . XP is perfectly usable in 2017 remember that . XP still many modern hardware driver than vista its a great truth.

you are saying having tons of winSxS blot is modern then you are at great fault .

6 hours ago, loblo said:

ME is OK as I still use it as my sole desktop OS those days. ;)

This said I have a couple of laptops with Win 7 (I hate that OS) which I use only when I need to do one of the two things I can't do with ME and that is making a payment on the Paypal website or downloading something from Mega.


 

You peeps needs a KernelEx update

13 hours ago, burd said:

My Dad used to use ME, he said Me was rock solid and a stable O/S and his most favourite O/S at the time. Many times like Windows 8,Vista And Me Most of the negativity spreads from people who never used the o/s and just read some random guy commenting that "Windows 8 is Bad" "Windows Vista Laggs and Sucks" and so on.

In real
Windows 8 is decent if you ever used it
Windows Vista SP2 Probably Faster than Win7
Windows ME Better than Win2k? Not As Unstable as people say but it did lack a few features from 98SE 

ME is suppose to be less stable than Win2k but ME has its own charm . 2k is fully business oriented and ME is sole mate of home users.

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A few reasons why people hated on Windows ME

  • The operating system was more bloated compared to Windows 98 and manufacturers forced the operating system onto cruddy, outdated hardware as they did with Vista. The main reasons Windows ME was slow because of system restore would take up cpu and ram.
  • Windows ME lacks real time DOS, however you can edit the operating system to make real mode dos available again.
  • Windows ME literally had no new features (at least above the hood). According to rloew, Windows ME does have a few API's unavailable in Windows 98 but it just appears ME never caught on enough for developers to take advantage of the new API. This may explain why Windows 98SE with KernelEx can't use a newer version of flash player ME w/ KernelEx was capable of (I believe it was 10, 11, or 12)
  • Really, it seems people's experience with ME is hit and miss. Some people say ME was the most unstable thing ever, others said it fixed unstable 95/98 installations upon upgrading. Apparently Windows ME was bad on a certain brand (forget it at the moment).
  • Because of the forcing of Windows ME onto bad hardware, developers were not devoted to driver development so they mixed VxD and WDM drivers. These two separate types of drivers were meant for two separate kernels, the NT and DOS kernels. Mixing the two causes conflict with each other, creating instability. So, if your Windows ME driver developers didn't practice mixing the two, the installation would probably be stable.

Windows ME is no different from most operating systems (aside from 10). As long as system was tweaked properly, it was as good as any other OS.

Edited by ~♥Aiko♥Chan♥~
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13 hours ago, jaclaz said:

2) The actual working version of Vista (from a certain point of view even better than 7) was SP2

 

My opinion too. Vista SP2 ran slightly better than 7 on my Dell XPS M1530 laptop which I owned until it broke down in December due to faulty GPU.

1 hour ago, ~♥Aiko♥Chan♥~ said:

A few reasons why people hated on Windows ME

  • The operating system was more bloated compared to Windows 98 and manufacturers forced the operating system onto cruddy, outdated hardware as they did with Vista. The main reasons Windows ME was slow because of system restore would take up cpu and ram.
  • Windows ME lacks real time DOS, however you can edit the operating system to make real mode dos available again.
  • Windows ME literally had no new features (at least above the hood). According to rloew, Windows ME does have a few API's unavailable in Windows 98 but it just appears ME never caught on enough for developers to take advantage of the new API. This may explain why Windows 98SE with KernelEx can't use a newer version of flash player ME w/ KernelEx was capable of (I believe it was 10, 11, or 12)
  • Really, it seems people's experience with ME is hit and miss. Some people say ME was the most unstable thing ever, others said it fixed unstable 95/98 installations upon upgrading. Apparently Windows ME was bad on a certain brand (forget it at the moment).
  • Because of the forcing of Windows ME onto bad hardware, developers were not devoted to driver development so they mixed VxD and WDM drivers. These two separate types of drivers were meant for two separate kernels, the NT and DOS kernels. Mixing the two causes conflict with each other, creating instability. So, if your Windows ME driver developers didn't practice mixing the two, the installation would probably be stable.

Windows ME is no different from most operating systems (aside from 10). As long as system was tweaked properly, it was as good as any other OS.

Your third point can be applied to Windows 7 vs. Vista too and everyone loved that OS it seems, 7 didn't introduce too much different from Vista and I remember thinking when I first tried 7 "is this just Vista with a fat taskbar" back when I was 9 years old. :P

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5 hours ago, IceFairyAmy said:

My opinion too. Vista SP2 ran slightly better than 7 on my Dell XPS M1530 laptop which I owned until it broke down in December due to faulty GPU.

Your third point can be applied to Windows 7 vs. Vista too and everyone loved that OS it seems, 7 didn't introduce too much different from Vista and I remember thinking when I first tried 7 "is this just Vista with a fat taskbar" back when I was 9 years old. :P

Even i didnt like vista at first and almost fell for the bait of it being a bad o/s, i later on thought about this and actually compared Vista SP1 with 7 and Vista would edge 7, Im glad i did that now i know how overhyped 7 is.

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On 10/15/2017 at 4:57 AM, burd said:

Even i didnt like vista at first and almost fell for the bait of it being a bad o/s, i later on thought about this and actually compared Vista SP1 with 7 and Vista would edge 7, Im glad i did that now i know how overhyped 7 is.

In some of my early tests Vista 64-Bit SP2 and DX11 patch outclassed Windows 7 SP1 in performance on the same configuration.

It's just the drop of support of Vista that is now hurting it otherwise it will perform better compared to W7.

I should probably add I had initial Vista resentment but that is because the laptop was too underpowered to really appreciate Vista and on XP it flew.  I really dislike the Pin To Taskbar in Windows 7 vs Quick Launch/Clear Desktop and even Vista is missing some of the nicer features of XP but it's a shame MS doesn't give a d*** about keeping the old user interfaces so people still have a choice instead of making everyone relearn a completely new OS user interface.

Edited by 98SE
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I've found ME to be a mixed bag compared to 98SE. So i second the recommendation for 98SE2ME:

http://www.mdgx.com/9s2m/

It installs updated ME components of 98SE, but not the godawful ME "improvements" that slowed it down and otherwise made it cumbersome to use. DOS remains fully functional.

In addition, i think ME looked better visually; you can add the ME icon/colors theme to 98SE using a U98SESP3 option:

http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/

I have legit copies of 98SE as well as ME. Over the years, i've tried both (clean installs), but only use 98SE now (mostly on P4/865 systems). After installing 98SE2ME, i notice an immediate improvement in speed, especially in bootup.

- Doug B.

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