Windows ME: The WORST Version of Windows Ever?!

Windows ME has often been called the worst version of Windows ever released (although Vista beat it in my recent Worst OSes video). I have a closer look at Windows ME and install it on an early 2000's eMachines PC, try out some programs and see how bad, or good, it really is!

Sources used in this video (under fair use or with permission):

Windows ME Video - Bundled with Windows ME

[msthalamus]

I worked at MSFT when Me came out. It was definitely called "me", but that was just marketing. I don't know anyone inside the company who called it anything other than Millennium. We didn't talk about much at all to be honest, though. We generally ran NT 4 and then Win2k rather than any of the 9xs.

[algiefeatherstonehaugh]

You were lucky - in 2000 I spent two whole days trying to get that abortion to install before giving up completely.

[Tall_Order]

>Quote "That image of ME being the worst version only came along in recent years".
For me it actually was the worst version.
We have satirical memes like "your mouse cursor has moved. You must restart for changes to take effect" because of it.

[gameguy]

The win 9.x line wasn't really based on DOS. It actually had it's own 32 bit kernel. It used DOS as a bootloader and then DOS handed over control to the 9.x kernal. DOS was kept running on the side for backwards compatbility. Which in some ways makes it a hybrid OS, but it's not like the first three versions of windows.

[jthorpedroid]

I remember buying a windows me PC from Tesco, it came with my first LCD screen too. Didn't have that many issues with mine compare to the day I got a vista laptop!

[paddycoleman]

Wish we could go back to the 3D look of previous Windows versions. Windows 10 is soulless.

[ugh.idontwanna]

I've always suspected ME's reputation for being unstable being down to drivers. Drivers were something that came on a floppy or CD when you bought something. You had to be an enthusiast back then to even consider updating a driver from the net.
That would explain why people who checks it out nowadays don't see the same issues. They'll usually get the latest compatible drivers,

[JimboJammy]

My experience was ME was positive initially. I'd heard mixed things about it back in the day, but I had the upgrade itch. I was running some older hardware that only had driver support for 98 and ME so that ruled out 2000 for me. I grabbed myself a copy and installed it from scratch onto my pc. I was really impressed, it felt like 98 but more modern (I suppose that's exactly what it was) I spent the next week slowly painfully copying my files from CD backups over to the machine. I kid you not, a day after I'd finally got ME exactly how I wanted it with all my files restored, one day I went to start my pc and it wouldn't boot. Would just bluescreen. I did nothing unusual the day before, shut it down as I would any other time but it never booted again. No idea why. Went back to 98 and stayed with 98 until xp came out and upgraded from 98 to xp. Never looked back. So although I want to stick up for ME, because while it worked, it was great, I can't because it decided to seemingly implode for no reason I'm aware of.

[MegaManNeo]

I have never really used Me as I jumped from a 98 PC straight to XP (which actually started in school for me) but I bought the installation discs from an earlier colleague of mine years ago so that I would have it in my collection.
Back then mom got me a computer book with lots of pictures of PCs, operating systems and other stuff in it, looking at Me always made me think how cool it looks.

[atornblad]

I actually had no problems with Windows Me. I installed it on my parents' home computers, because it had System Restore and System File Protection, so that when things got messed up, I could help them get back to a working state quickly.

[cowboyfrankspersonalvideos]

When Windows ME came out, I purchased a new Dell notebook which came with ME. I plugged it into my home network, which by that time had about 8 or 9 computers on it. The notebook which was a fairly high end machine for the time, was so slow it took almost 2 minutes to open a one page MS Word document. After fighting with it for several days I discovered the issue. ME was trying to index everything on my network, which would have been somewhere around 500 gigabytes at that time. Once I figured how to turn off indexing, which was on by default, the problem went away. Shortly thereafter, I deleted ME and bought a copy of 98 for that machine.

[MattRoseBoswall]

I remember that in about 2006, I tried to make a networked file server using an old PC and Windows ME. I think it lasted about 3 weeks before it refused to boot - and then I installed Linux and it ran for 3 years!

[umageddon]

I used ME for awhile before XP and never had any real issues that I can remember... maybe ATI driver issues?

[nuttyjawa]

I worked in the tech department of a PC World during ME - ughhh dark days :)

[MikeDragon]

Honestly, I like Windows ME, always have. Part of it might be at least in part, mostly the nostalgia factor since Windows ME was the very first Windows I ever used when my dad bought our very first PC back in 2000 (a Metron PC, powered by a 566MHz Celeron and 32 MB of SDRAM and a 6.5GB hard drive. I still have that machine and it still works), but truth is... We never had issues with ME for as long as we had it on our PC. We'd browse the web, make documents on Word, I'd play my games, etc. It always worked fine and quick. Maybe we were some of the "lucky ones" or just coincidence, but maybe there might be something to that theory that upgrading from 98 could have something to do with it, as ours was a native install. Regardless, despite all the hate it gets and recognizing that it does have flaws, Windows ME still has a place in my heart.

[tyrgoossens]

Windows ME remains the only OS I've ever downgraded from. I'm sure it ran perfectly fine for a lot of people but on my system it didn't.

[jbuchana]

A few months before Windows XP came out, I bought a new Toshiba laptop with Windows ME. When it was running, it was just fine, but it crashed at least once a day. Shortly after this, XP came out and I had it dual-booting XP and Red Hat Linux, both were very stable and I used that laptop for years.

[ewanwood]

I did install ME back in the day on my 1999 PC - Celeron 333, Nvidia TNT, 64MB ram to see what it was all about and I never found any issues. My only problem was I was still playing DOS games like Blood, DUKE3D and even DOOM so there it was not so great. I still have that PC but now upgraded to P3 350 and 128MB of Ram and USB 2.0 card running 98SE. I think Dan after watching I might clean install ME for Windows use. I have got Windows on an SD to IDE set up as well as a mechanical HDD. I might copy DOS 7 to the HDD and use a floppy to boot to DOS for real mode for my DOS games. Can't 100% remember but if I boot to DOS from floppy it can't see the SD/IDE disk anyway. Great video as always.

[almurray]

“My very good friends at...” makes me cringe. Unless you can post a photo of you sharing a social experience with the staff at xyz sponsor then please leave that line out.

[MC-]

Nice video Dan. I remember using "Me" quite a bit. Worked well for the most part. Really only crashed on me while gaming. Back then we actually transported our entire PC, Monitor, and peripherals to friends houses for "Game Nights" and the infamous LAN parties. After dealing with the pretty frequent game crashes, I switched over to "2000." Liked it better and never looked back. Well I guess that isn't entirely true. I did make a "DOS Box" and installed 95 (w/ MS-Dos), 98, Me, and 2000 using System Commander. As like you, nostalgic reasons. I think I'm going to fire that up now after seeing your video. :)