> You know there's a lot of people out there that would press F1 or DEL and wonder why > it wasn't working
Some might even ... gasp ... attach a keyboard to the system!
"Note to Noobs:
We are glad to help you but simply posting that something does not work is not going to lead to you getting help. The more information you can supply defining your problem, the less likely it will be that you will get smart-alec replies.
I don't get it. I always read how people had problems with ME. I used it for several years. With a partition and everything else you can throw at it. Never had any problems with it at all. Short of the normal Windows glitches you see on every version. I actually thought it was a nice, stable OS
> I don't get it. I always read how people had problems with ME. I used it for several > years. With a partition and everything else you can throw at it. Never had any > problems with it at all. Short of the normal Windows glitches you see on every > version. I actually thought it was a nice, stable OS
You must’ve been very lucky, particularly with the kind of hardware you had. Windows ME was intended as a sort of stepping stone between Windos 9x and the planned Windows NT-based successor to both Windows ME and Windows 2000 that would unify the home and professional operating systems. As such, it supported both Windows 9x VxD drivers and WDM drivers. This never seemed to work particularly well, and driver issues were widespread. It had enhanced power management support over Windows 98, but this was plagued with stability issues. It’s up for debate whether this was a core OS issue, poor driver quality, or buggy chipset implementations, but the end result is the same.
Quite a few features were removed in an effort to push businesses to Windows 2000, including MS Fax, AD client, policy editor, automatic installation, personal web server/ASP, and the resource kit. Additionally, real-mode DOS functionality was severely restricted, including removing support for redirecting filesystem access through DOS drivers. Although this had always been very slow on Windows 9x compared to 32-bit VxD drivers, it allowed people to continue to use older (often expensive) storage devices that never had 32-bit drivers developed.
Developer previews of Windows XP (known as “Whistler” at the time) were available two months before Windows ME was released. It was obvious Windows ME was a dead end, so developers never paid much attention to it, and often didn’t bother to test with it at all. It was more common to be testing with Windows 98, Windows NT4 and Windows 2000, and hoping Windows ME would just go away.
> I gave ME one try, and it trashed my partition table. Obviously went back to 98SE at > that point and stayed there until 2000/XP.
I didn't really have much trouble with ME with my Pentium 166, except for not being able to properly access DOS from within Windows unlike 98 where you could restart in DOS mode (with ME, the only way to run pure DOS was via boot disk). I eventually wiped it after about 2 years and went back to 98SE so it wasn't such a pain to run DOS games (the original release of GTA1 ran faster in DOS than Windows for example). For a while that PC had a 98SE/ME hybrid where I had manually updated a lot of the programs to their ME versions (including the Windows ME Explorer layouts which were a bit better than the 98 style).
But yeah, ME was a dead end for Microsoft, it's not something which should have even existed as a commercial (paid) product IMO. Maybe as a final Windows 98 update but not killing off "WinDOS" like it did. Windows 2000 was already out, ran infinitely better on anything that wasn't a potato in Y2K computing (such as my Pentium 166) and had a better file system than FAT32.
Thank you for the explanation of ME. I find that quite interesting. I worked at AOL doing tech support when it was released and we all new XP was coming, so I was surprised that ME was even released. I also got to play with Longhorn and Vista when it was all still in beta. I thought it was going to be a great OS. But as it developed it got worse. Worse performance and stripped a lot of cool features. While I liked the new UI, I hated Vista when it was released
> I don't get it. I always read how people had problems with ME. I used it for several > years. With a partition and everything else you can throw at it. Never had any > problems with it at all. Short of the normal Windows glitches you see on every > version. I actually thought it was a nice, stable OS
In my case Windows ME killed itself three times just from turning on and off the computer without further programs installed. I had a PIII 700MHz Slot 1 machine with an AOpen board then. It was working fine and suddenly a BSoD makes you install the whole thing again. I returned to Windows 2000 Professional and stayed there for 3 years until I considered WinXP stable nor truly necessary.
I've been a Windows user since 1993, now sticking to Windows 7. Yet, I'm fed up with telemetry and online surveillance I'm turning forcibly to Linux. At least it doesn't crash anymore with simple things like switching from KDE to Gnome.
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