MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - Re: Modern version

> 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.