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LGR - The Windows Me Experience (Patreon)

Published:
2020-04-21 20:03:45
Edited:
2020-05-19 18:35:16
Imported:
2021-03

Content

https://youtu.be/CaNDeyYP98A

Heh, Windows Millennium Edition. Just seeing those three words together conjures up memories of driver issues, bloatware, and blue screened instability.

And now it's time to give it another look as its 20th anniversary approaches! Personally, I hadn't used it in around eighteen years, so I was wondering how accurate my own bad memories of it were. Especially since I ran it on a cheaply-manufactured Compaq Presario back then.

After playing around with it this week on far more reliable hardware, it got me wondering... was it really THAT bad? Or were my problems perhaps more the fault of my hardware and software configuration two decades ago?

So yeah, that's what this video is all about! Kind of along the same lines as what I did with Microsoft Bob a while back: taking a look at what many say is one of the biggest failures in the software industry ever and seeing if it lives up to its reputation. It's got history, an unboxing of a brand new copy, the installation process, demonstration of key features, and of course playing and benchmarking some games for both DOS and Windows. Hope you enjoy, stay safe out there!

Files

The Windows Me Experience: Was It THAT Bad?

Revisiting the infamous Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition from the year 2000. It's considered by some as the worst Windows operating system, and even one of the biggest flops in tech period. But was Me truly as terrible as its reputation suggests? ● LGR links: https://www.patreon.com/LazyGameReviews https://www.twitter.com/LazyGameReviews https://www.facebook.com/LazyGameReviews ● Music courtesy of: http://www.epidemicsound.com #LGR #Software #Retrospective

Comments

Anonymous

I was working at Staples when WindowsMe released. I remember everyone blasting it, but it was always based on something they've heard or someone told them it was horrible. I've used it for a while and never had a problem with it...

Anonymous

I installed it too, on a reliable machine recently, and didn't have any issues...

Anonymous

Wouldn't have had a problem with ME if they didn't take away the ability to boot into pure DOS and hadn't crippled the base DOS commands (like FORMAT.COM) to require Windows.

Anonymous

Also Windows ME helped make the old joke possible about Windows CE ME NT :)

Anonymous

I remember not having one single issue with Windows me back in the day. I knew lot's of people who did. But me? Nop, nothing, nada. I really enjoyed the clean look of it and, for those without problems, it was rather stable and fast. Sad part: I was the death of DOS for home computers.

Anonymous

I Remember installing It on my custom built AMD k6... It uninstalled itself after a week when It completely corrupted the MBR of the hard disk XD I then reinstalled Windows 95 and kept It until Windows XP came along.

Anonymous

I installed it at work. Mail server failed to work so i had to reinstall Windows 98 SE. Good times.

Anonymous

I can believe that they shipped a boot disk. Even by 2000 some lame OEMs still didn't support the El Torito standard that makes bootable CDs possible.

Anonymous

I never experienced Me at the time since I went from 98 straight to xp. A while ago I was building a Y2K build with a S423 P4 amd RDRAM and decided to put WinMe on it. I Expected tons of issues, but it all worked great. More reliable than 98se in fact. Im guessing mature drivers made the difference here.

Anonymous

I'll just note that at 27.24 you typed 'Windows Me' and Clippy did a little sexy move, but as soon as you typed 'Comic Sans' it rolled your eyes at you. Comic Sans even kills Clippy's mood... Thanks for the nostalgia trip. I came across some ziplock style bags with that holographic CD and that floppy on a computer's shop I worked at around '03 and assumed they were OEM packs, as they had no Serial #. Seems MS was somewhat cheap on the packaging for this edition

Anonymous

Allow me to share a secret. When Windows ME and 2000 were working on, there were two Windows teams at Microsoft - one working on Windows 2000 (the NT team), and one working on Windows Me (the 9x team). The "A" players on the Windows 9x team were poached to the Windows 2000 team to bring it up to snuff, while the "B" players were left behind to ship Windows ME. It is not as bad as folks say (in my opinion), but that artifact did have an effect on the quality of the builds.

Anonymous

I had no problems with it at all.

Anonymous

Wonder where that baby (from the video editor) is now ...

Kris Asick

Funny thing about the side-by-sides performance comparisons near the end... I'm pretty sure I saw microstutter on the Me side of things compared to the 98 side. Even now with later versions of Windows 10, microstutter has reared its ugly head again as programs which were not made to play nice with desktop compositing, since it wasn't required to use it prior to Windows 8, have a high chance of having framerate issues despite reporting FPS values at or greater than 60. The frames are rendered internally, just not drawn to the screen. It seems like Microsoft has never understood how to keep that side of things working right. :P

Anonymous

Never got to use this one myself to my knowledge, my family skipped right over to an xp machine after using 98 se. Seems like every early 2000's UI design was equally ugly as sin, but in a way you just cant help but enjoy, like Guy Fieri's wardrobe lol

Anonymous

I just read the title, and I got a little eye twitch. It seems that Microsoft got a good version of Windows at every other release. After Me was XP (good/ok), followed by Vista (bad), 7 (decent), 8 (not good, especially the major UI change from 7, and the driver compatibility issues), 8.1 (better), and finally 10 (with various luck at major updates within Win10 as well).

Anonymous

Windows Mundane Effort. I remember running it for a while but quickly realized it's just 98 and switched back to Windows 2000.

Anonymous

I used ME for a few years when our family got our first new PC; an Emachines 600is. We had little issues with it at the time, outside of my mother loving novelty malware like Bonzai Buddy. From my experience, if your system had parts that were heavily supported, or from right after ME released you run into vastly less issues overall. Loved the video, keep up the great content!

LazyGameReviews
>>35615960

Indeed, that seems to be the main takeaway! Decent parts with solid support? Gonna have an okay time. Cheap components with barely-supported drivers? Maaaybe not so much.

Anonymous

I used Windows Me on my, I think it was a Pentium 2, machine. From what I remember, I needed to install a special patch to get it to correctly shut down! I regret upgrading that machine, but it would've been too much work to go back to 95 that was on there before.

LazyGameReviews
>>35615737

Win2K is one I'd like to revisit as well. I definitely remember a lotta stuff not working with its NT codebase, in terms of 9x gaming.

moosemaimer

Interesting you mention that MS didn't include much in their boxes, I have a branded golf ball I found on the floor of a CompUSA, no idea what it would have come with.

Anonymous

Also, for those who don't know, there's a tool called "98SE2ME" that takes an install of 98SE and migrates some of the improvements from Me into it. It's like having Me but without all the bad stuff. https://msfn.org/board/topic/46349-98se2me-killer-replacements-me-98-se/ http://www.mdgx.com/9s2m/

LazyGameReviews
>>35614976

Haha, an apt comparison. It's so absurd, and yet consciously composed, that ya can't look away.

LazyGameReviews
>>35615617

Perhaps because it's more recent, but Windows 8 is a solid contender for most irksome Windows OS in my mind. Bloated, sluggish, and annoying to use in every way. I've never been asked to "fix" the computers of family members more than when they used Win8 machines.

LazyGameReviews
>>35614824

Ah I wish I had some framerate analysis tools like Digital Foundry or something, cuz I wouldn't be surprised at all to see increased microstuttering on Me. There's something that can feel ever so slightly "off" when gaming on it. Perhaps that's one reason why.

LazyGameReviews
>>35614226

I'd love to read some good first-hand stories from that time period about those two teams, no doubt there were some rivalries and resentments.

LazyGameReviews
>>35613817

Ha! Yeah, even poor Clippit isn't immune to the unfortunate aesthetic of Comic Sans. Glad you enjoyed the trip!

LazyGameReviews
>>35613765

Likewise, I expected so much worse. Mature drivers on decent hardware seems to be key, even moreso than 98SE. Which, I guess one could still say is a fault of Me, but it's also a sign of how inconsistent things were in the year 2000.

LazyGameReviews
>>35613160

Even more sad is it still runs on DOS at all times, they just hid it away! Super annoying stuff as a DOS gamer.

LazyGameReviews
>>35613092

Yeah I'd probably keep it installed on that PC if it had better support for pure DOS. Such an irritating and needless limitation, despite its small gains to load times and supposed driver stability.

Anonymous

With Windows ME my computer and my clients' computer would encounter registry corruption. The system had some sort of built in protection that would try to repair or restore it, but that always failed. ME would say that it needed to repair itself on every startup, over and over. I cannot remember if it happened on clean installs immediately or not. I do know we tried clean installs but the same thing would always come in a day or two. The fix was to wipe it out and install Win98 SE.

Jason Wellband

It came on my 2000 Compaq laptop. I couldn't upgrade fast enough. I just remember it not really being as stable as 98 was. And that Compaq pc you had.. I got a few of them as rejects when people upgraded. I turned them into servers. Now I wonder if I still have them somewhere haha

Anonymous

As long as you stay away from WDM drivers, stability is "OK". Start mixing WDM with VXD drivers and you're screwed 10 times over. I ran WinMe back in 1999. My dad got a Compaq Presario for me, with a Pentium 3 , 500MHz and 128MB of RAM , 12.5GB Drive, DVD and an ATI Rage Pro 128 (Fury with MPEG2 Decoder). Quite a nice system actually. I eventually replaced Windows Me with 98SE, and later Windows 2000 Pro , but hey! - Compaq tried pushing it.. and I went with it for a little while :)

LazyGameReviews
>>35612719

Even more true today, in my experience! Mostly secondhand half-truths and bitter memories from twenty years ago. I've definitely done my part to bash it over the years myself, so I'm pleasantly surprised to be having this much fun with it.

LazyGameReviews
>>35616318

From Microsoft? Perhaps from a Microsoft Golf release. I've got some branded SimGolf golf balls that Maxis included with that game, too!

LazyGameReviews
>>35616271

Yeah, going back to 95 from scratch is actually a ton of work. So many updates, patches, drivers, and applications that need installing and configuration.

LazyGameReviews
>>35616345

Ooh neat, didn't know about that! Makes sense seeing how much stuff from Me was available on 98SE anyway with a download or two.

LazyGameReviews
>>35616813

The whole "PC Health" featureset included in Me certainly seems to be one of the most hated aspects, according to old reviews and user reports I've read. Makes sense that the one program I ran in the latter part of the video has an option to disable all of that.

LazyGameReviews
>>35616818

I wonder if they're functional at all, haha. That Presario 5000 was easily the most unreliable PC I've owned. Most components failed within a couple years and the whole setup was toast by 2003.

LazyGameReviews
>>35616880

Now I'm wondering what's installed on my setup, I believe it's all WDM stuff. Except for maybe the SCSI controller, but I'm not sure. Compaq sure was pushing Me hard back then, heh. Them, HP, and IBM were partnered with Microsoft to promote it. I don't think I included it in the video, but they actually all worked together on a nationwide bus tour, taking their machines with Windows Me to shopping malls so people could "Meet Me."

LazyGameReviews
>>35613108

Haha, ahh I entirely forgot about that. I've gotta put together a machine for each of them so I can live the CEMENT dream.

Michael Steenbeek

Windows ME cut out everything from DOS it could, in order to speed up booting and to prevent DOS drivers from loading. The latter would have made it more stable - if it hadn't been rushed out in so little time. A fun thing to try is copying IO.SYS from Windows ME to Windows 98 - it speeds up boot time considerably! (Needs to be coupled with copying the contents of C:\Windows\command and C:\windows\command.com and conagent.exe if you still want to start MS-DOS apps in Windows).

LazyGameReviews
>>35618192

I might just have to try that with IO.SYS! 98SE with quicker boot times alongside DOS mode would be nice.

Anonymous

I never really had much experience with ME, other than hearing kids at school talk about how crappy their computer was with it. I went straight from 98SE to XP. It seems like every other OS, Microsoft has to release a short-lived dud. ME, Vista and 8 are from the software version of the Isle of Misfit Toys.

LazyGameReviews
>>35618470

Heh, yeah I'd wager Microsoft were certainly aware of its nature as a kind of "stopgap OS" with how quickly they tossed it aside. Mainstream support for it didn't last long at all, ending in December of 2003. Little wonder why XP outpaced Me in sales almost immediately.

50_SHADES_OF_BEIGE

Godspeed. I don't dabble in ME. I have enough issues with W98 SP3... My next newer machine has XP on it.

Anonymous

I fondly remember using Windows ME. Not that it was very good, but it came on the first PC that was actually "mine" and I could use uninterrupted in my own bedroom. I remember all the bluescreens and such, but usually I could just press spacebar and continue using it as if nothing had happened. This comment seems pretty mundane but I just can't put into words the enjoyment I got from using that piece of old tech back when it was still (relatively) relevant. Those days were my introduction to instant messengers, chat rooms, emulators and a good chunk of the Web.

Anonymous

My brother graduated from high school in 2000 and my dad had a custom PC made for him as a present. it came with Win ME, within just a few weeks we went back to 98 all the way until XP came out. We were tired of the problems.

Anonymous

I seem to be one of the few people who actually liked Windows ME, so this was quite entertaining to watch! With a few tweaks it always ran fine for me, and I liked some of the Windows 2000 interface features it added, like the auto complete you showed. I never really had any more trouble with it than 98. The lack of an option to boot to MS-DOS was certainly an irritation, but I could have sworn I had a patch someone made that simply added that option back to the shut down menu.

Anonymous

Wow. That brought back memories. I still remember exactly what that disc looked like before you even got to the unboxing. I fondly remember buying that when it first came out (I think maybe even on launch day??) for the upgrade option... there was a Staples deal to get a free Iomega 100MB ZIP Disk drive. Which were like $50, so it was basically a free ZIP Drive. I used to also build quality machines with ASUS motherboard VoodooFX graphics cards, good memory, etc, and I actually found it to be quite stable. I remember everyone complaining at the time, but I really enjoyed it for the year or two I used it before running WindowsXP. The crazy music screen saver too never really got replaced with XP, which I used all the time. I actually remember missing the Themes I used to use too, which weren't really an XP thing either. Anyhow, cheers to this video! I thouroughly enjoyed it! :)

Anonymous

Generally speaking, I think you're right that a bunch of WinME's bad rep was earned due to being roughly co-incident with "capacitor plague" and an era of generally cheaply built, shitty computers.

Anonymous

I hope you upload the video from Movie Maker!!

Anonymous

I actually BOUGHT ME as a fresh-faced 19-year-old, and I honestly liked it. Slightly updated, cleaner looking icons, integrated ZIP/Compressed File support. I augmented it with some hacks to make the icon labels transparent. I never had the issues people talked about, as it ran on my first-ever custom built computer. Ahhh, the good ol' days!

Anonymous

I'm in the minority that had no stability issues with Windows ME, running on an IBM NetVista (Pentium 3, 20GB hard drive, enough RAM for Unreal Tournament at high detail but don't remember the exact number). I used my Windows ME for Windows gaming and school work ... don't remember if I had Word or was using Microsoft Works at the time. I also didn't have too much issue with Windows Vista, but that said I saw the reviews beforehand and loaded up with 2+ GB RAM, dual core, fast disk, and enough GPU to run Unreal Tournament 2003 on high before installing.

Anonymous

That forgotten startup sound hit me. I hadn't heard that one in forever. I had ME for just long enough before I got on the Microsoft Developer's Network and could get a free upgrade to XP as a student. But that sound just transports me back to going off to school in the fall of 2001. My parents gave me a budget, and I got the best PC I could from ABS, which was a great value back then for what you got.

Anonymous

Give me Winamp skins over that nonsense any day.

Anonymous

So we had a Vaio P4 that came with ME. Trying to install Photoshop with it and it, couldn't install Photoshop. Spent some time on a support call, turns out the driver from the DVD drive conflicted with Photoshop.

Anonymous
>>35629046

We replaced it with Xp, although really that was the only major issue.

Anonymous

Another good video! I also agree with your findings - for me, I always did a fresh reload of Windows about every 6 months at the most back then, and under that circumstance I really didn't have too many issues with ME. In my memory, the thing I recall the most is how it really didn't do much - and it was quickly replaced with XP in any case. It was... fine. Nothing good or bad, it's pretty forgettable in face. But I will disagree on the late 90s-2k era media skins - they were at the time, and still are, awesome. So much better than the boring stuff we have now.

Anonymous

An LGR video with 3D accelerated benchmarks?! Never thought I'd see the day!

Anonymous

These "unloved" windows releases are intriguing to me. Despite being a computer "enthusiast?" since the early nineties I have never used Windows Me or Windows 8 for more than a few min.

Vladimir Vyun

I remember having Windows 98 for about two years and never needing to reinstall or fix it. Then one guy told me how great that new Windows is. So I installed it (obviously, it was Me). Had to reinstall it like five times in half a year. So yeah, my own experience with Windows Me was terrible.

Anonymous

I was a teenager when I got it and I remember I enjoyed the attempt to make it cool and colourful. Unfortunately I also remover having to deactivate the animations and all the frills to make it look like windows 98 to gain on performance :-(

Headset Guy

I once tried to tell one of my managers that Windows Me wasn't that bad. He jokingly "fired" me.

Anonymous

Great as usual! Me actually wasn’t the first version of Windows to ship with 3D Pinball, though—NT 4 (where I discovered it) and 2000 shipped with it too. Maybe Me got it as part of its attempts to be pretend Windows 2000.

Anonymous

Wow, replacing your Win98SE install for ME.. That's quite something. I think I would've installed it on another SD card, so I could play with both in the future. Have your cookie and eat it too, my friend! :D

Anonymous

Loved this video. My grandparents had that exact Compaq computer with ME on it and I played Sim City 3000 so much on that thing.

Anonymous

I actually had fond memories of that version. All my favourite games, my first steps into programming, reinstalling every six month...

Anonymous

Now I want to know where the window ME baby from the clips is and what they're doing now! ><

Anonymous
>>35637432

Interesting they'd ship it on a business-oriented OS first.

Anonymous

There's an interesting patch I found once - can't remember the name, it may have been something like ME98 - that added all the best bits from Millennium Edition to 98SE. Stuff like System Restore and all that.

Anonymous

'Mixed results' is the best way to describe it. I was working helping help desk back in the day of ME and each ME experience was very different. Sometimes installing it would be flawless, other times drives just would not load so you would have to start over from scratch. Fun stuff.

Anonymous

My experience of ME (coming from 98SE) was that it stopped my printer and scanner working. Since that was a good chunk of why we had a computer, that was painful. I remember trying (as a 15 or so year old) to explain to my father why it didn't work anymore and had to rather quickly go back to 98SE. I think XP was at SP2 before I dared try it.

Anonymous

A friend's dad had a cyber cafe and computer repair shop in the late 90s, and I worked there every now and then. They had these binders with OEM versions of Windows ME (as well as Office and other stuff), and we had to install / upgrade a ton of stuff on there. I got paid a pittance, but I got to use the internet! I also eventually just left my 486 there so that they could use it at the cafe. In exchange, I got to use the internet, without limits. There was a hell of a lot of Astalavista and Morpheus going on, lemme tell ya.

Anonymous

I think it's funny the $210 full version back in 2000 would cost $316 today.

Anonymous

Absolutely great video with all the right things in it. Despite the reputation of Me, this is like a warm blanket of nostalgia for me. Also nice to be reminded about the great aesthetics of the Windows Media Player skins of that time. I think I spent hours and hours trying out custom skins and visualizations for players like Winamp, WMP and Sonique.

Anonymous

From edutainment to horror in 1 week

Robert Butler

I tried back in 2000 on my friend's Compaq and it was lucky to get an hour of solid use before either freezing or BSOD'ing.

Anonymous

I enjoyed this video a lot. I feel like a old man already. Windows ME Was my first OS and I hated it. Poor poor Bill Gates.

Anonymous

Imo ME wasn't bad at all, if you look at it as targeted for normal home user's that turned off their computer every time they were "finished" with what they were doing.

Anonymous

I think above all it indicated the huge assumed gap between "consumer" and "professional"... and what it actually turned out to be in the end.

evistre

q: have you done any videos on dope wars? i didn't find any with a cursory search. :)

Anonymous

I never had any problem with Windows ME, I liked it fine. I particularly liked that system rollback feature it had.

Ezydenias

I usually don't use restore points today. If it is really ruined I reinstall it. Only use restore for a stable version to save some files. Or just use Linux to save them.

Ezydenias

We actually had me and I remember working better than 98 for us.

Anonymous

"Woah, Clint is really fast at typing the Windows product key!" Looks closer.... "oh."

Anonymous

I had used Windows Me for a good couple of years, as my first own pc was a family hand me down (figures), and had it up until 2006 (yeah, crazy)! Now of course, I had my fair share of problems, with incompatibility with games, crashes, and all that, although, as you mention, it might've been due to hardware (I can't tell what the specs were, all I remember is that it was an IBM PC300GL with Win98 on it originally, which might also explain a couple of things). But for the general needs, like media consuming and surfing the web, I remember it serving me perfectly fine (but I was longing for a better XP machine as gaming for new titles was a no-go)! So yeah, I tend to joke about it every once in a while (as I did in your initial Twitter post, as well), but honestly, I am in the camp that says that actually, it was pretty decent for what it was. Still, retrospecively, it might've made more sense if Me never existed, and the new features would've been just put into 98 as an SE2 version, or something, especially since a year later, Windows XP was coming.

LazyGameReviews
>>35619049

Indeed, it's rather tough to describe the particular kind of happiness that results from messing around with Windows Me and that whole era of tech. The older I get, the more special it seems in hindsight.

LazyGameReviews
>>35620607

I could've sworn that was a thing as well, yeah! Didn't find any such patch on a quick search, but I'm sure someone will pop up in the comments asking why I didn't show it :P

LazyGameReviews
>>35623829

Totally, and combined with all the garbage pre-installed software and other bloat? No doubt in my mind it was a perfect storm of substandard products meshing together into something nasty.

LazyGameReviews
>>35622959

Glad to hear you enjoyed it, Jason! I wish I had a better setup to appreciate it for what it was back then.

LazyGameReviews
>>35625848

That was the way to do it, it seems! Fresh install on a custom build. No third-party bloat or mismatched drivers getting in the way.

LazyGameReviews
>>35637602

It was mentioned in the video, but nothing was replaced :) I use multiple SD cards for this system, so this was simply installed on top of a clone of my 98SE setup for this video.

LazyGameReviews
>>35695520

System restores certainly saved me a lotta time fixing up the Windows XP machines of friends and family for a while! Can't say I've used it since the mid-2000s though.

LazyGameReviews
>>35710902

Indeed, looking back on what was to come in terms of Windows releases, Me's existence is hard to justify from a consumer perspective. I can see why MS did it though, in regards to cashing in real quick while XP was still cookin'

LazyGameReviews
>>35650330

For real though! And to think, with Windows 10 it just became a free upgrade for existing users, and way less for the full thing. How times change.

Anonymous

My retinas got burned off by that holographic disk 😳

Anonymous

I agree with the assessment of hardware. Never considered it at the time. Also, I think Windows Me was the first time WDM drivers were used in the consumer space. Did make me ponder the endless arguments people would have over Win9x or WINNT for running games, though. Some swore Quake was better on Windows 2000. I never tested it though.

Anonymous

Man, I remember my mom bought a PC at the time with ME on it. I was quite mildly annoyed by it in short order as I worked with NT all day long. Next day, some mysterious reason, Windows 2000 professional was installed on it. Wonder what happened? 🤷‍♂️😄

Anonymous

My experience with Windows ME was that it was just Windows 98 with some extra patches. The disc appearance itself was totally awesome though. But considering Windows 2k was right on the horizon, I quickly downgraded to plain Windows NT until 2k came out.