why did microsoft make ME? I heard it was an interim OS, and that it was the 3rd installment of win98
but with 2000 coming why did they put out ME?
and why is it so bad? doesnt microsoft know what they are doing?
what/who was ME designed for?

^(-.-)~~~]>:}>

"with 2000 coming why did they put out ME?"
ME was designed for home use. Win2K was designed more for a business OS.

"why did they put out ME?"
To make money

"what/who was ME designed for?"
People who don't know better.

giggles,

You always ask the hardest questions ;)

I've installed ME on no less than a 1/2 dozen PCs & have ME/XP dual boot on my own main machine. I have no complaints & have yet to encounter any major problems. With a few tweaks, it runs great! Check out Trev's site:

http://www.burzurq.com/forum/trevtweak.html

I think ME's gotten a bad rap & most of the people that knock it either haven't tried it, or haven't tried it long enough...lol. I consider it to be almost like "XP based on the 9x kernel". It has better hardware & multimedia support, system restore, & a better defrag than Win9x...plus the eye candy is softer & nicer than Win9x. Don't forget, Microsoft will eventually be abandoning support for Win98, but ME will still be around. Actually, Win98 would have been dead a few months ago if it weren't for the multitude of cry-babies who refuse to give it up! LMAO!

Here's a couple of explanations of what Millennium brings to the table:

http://www.hallogram.com/windowsmillennium/

http://users.iafrica.com/c/cq/cquirke/winme.htm

so 2000-office and ME-home, ok.

but where did it go wrong?
i used it in a computer of mine for a day or two and i really didnt like it at all
the look was bad
the start menu was ugly
i couldnt find drivers for my hardware, although thats probly my fault

and people tons of people on this site complain about how bad it is, it must be bad then.
why did it have so many bugs and generally unpleasant problems?
did microsoft miss something?

^(-.-)~~~]>:}>

OK...I had to reboot to get into ME. I still don't understand the bad rap it's gotten. And you basically admitted that you didn't give it a fair shot either. I bet you went into it with the preconceived notion that "it sucks" & didn't even try to prove or disprove it.

Hey, you said you have several machines...if you have the ME CD, why not format one of those machines & give ME a whirl? Make sure you meet at least the minimum specs & apply Trev's tweaks & all the Windows Updates...then give us a review in a week or two. ME drivers are readily available these days & in many cases, 98 drivers will work.

BTW, the upgrade CD will work as full install, provided you have a 95 or 98 CD to pop in (as proof of a previous Windows OS) during the installation...95 or 98 do NOT have to be installed 1st...

Where's Skip when ya need him? LOL

One other point...I assume that you read the other forums. Seems to me there's an awful lot of people having probs with XP, 2000, 98, 95, Win3.1, etc...so it's not just ME

Oooops...that sounds like ME as in "me". I guess I should have wrote, "Millennium"...lol

The biggest problem with Windows ME is that Microsoft added several half baked software modules to Windows ME to sell it to business customers! The second problem is that they redesigned and improved the way device drivers have to work and most of the hardware providers failed to take note and provided "bad" drivers.

You can get rid of the first problem by removing TaskMonitor and PCHealth from the startup list, and then deleting their secondary programs in the Task Scheduler (PCHealth and TuneUp). And then remove the Universal Plug and Play feature in Windows Setup.

For the driver problem, just locate all of the current drivers for your hardware, stating with the system board chip set, video adapter, Network adapter, and anything else you can find.

Of course there were more than a few bugs in the software, so you need to do all of the Windows ME Updates and Critical Security updates (including IE) (skip .NET, Windows Media Player and Language support) before trying to use it.

And then there are a few fixes for large memory systems, etc. But once you do all of the documented changes, it works quite well and has a lot better USB support. There are still some problem areas. The ZIP drive drivers and LexMark Printer drivers were never fixed by their vendors, and a number of older scanners do not have Windows ME compatible drivers.

While it does not have a DOS Mode, it does run almost all DOS applications quite well, something that XP does not do.

Trev's tweaks covers most of the changes you need to make at Windows ME - How To's at Burzurq.com, as does my page, and both have plenty of links to read for understanding and tweaking Windows ME.

actually i bought a hdd on ebay with ME preinstalled

i just didnt really like the look of it and this was even before i had read about people having problems with it
i remember myself thinking, ahhh i dont like this, stupid guy put ME on it, lets get 98 back

im not making a point to rip on me and say that it totally sucks i was just wondering why it had so many bugs and why microsoft even released it

today tho, it looks like microsoft got the message and got back to the one OS for all and the latest version of NT for the business guys

personally i feel the less OSs out there the better
when you release two at a time it means that you have people who come to you for updates and support for more different setups and it just puts a general strain on hardware and software developers who have to make their products work well on multiple platforms
also when there's two out there you have to find out which ones right for you and take a gamble at which ones better and which ones gonna stick around for the longest
maybe these things arent important to other people but they are to me

^(-.-)~~~]>:}>

They had to put something out. They don't like to fix and do "free" upgrades to old products like Windows 98. So they fixed and added features and called it Windows ME, and $OLD it. XP was far from ready at the time (as it was far from ready when they released XP and XP Pro).

Now if you ran a disk with someone's copy of Windows ME on it, no telling how much "customizing" of the desktop and Widows they had done.

JackG,
you type faster than me. that's me not millenium edition
and so those are all the fixes and tweaks i have to do to get ME to work decently
well, i could get a ME disc and do all that or i could format my hdd install 98, install updates, install drivers and cache master and im done

there are still a lot of anoying bugs tho when it comes to using 98 with modern hardware
i learned that today :(
i had problems with my mx500 mouse not working in games and then not working at all for a while until reboot

i had a problem with my ati tv wonder app not opening at boot, and when it wont open everything halts and i have to restart my computer and this happens quite frequently.

i couldnt get .kkreiger, the 96k game, to work without everything being red, even after trying a generic nvidia driver as opposed to my asus driver for my geforce3

yesterday i rebooted after my ati tv app wouldnt open only to find that my desktop had been completely rearranged without even asking me about it

today i opened a folder to find that three new files had simply shown up, one was a dll one had in it the name of an app that i had installed a while ago and the other was named completely random jibberesh

and to top it all off, everytime i finish booting i see the black screen and at the bottom it says completed updating windows... continuing to load files
every single time i boot! i dont have any weird software installed and ive never even taken my month old machine on line yet so i dont have any viruses or spyware

windows 98 is clearly not right for my computer
everyone who told me that win98 was real it was fun but it wasnt real fun you are *mostly* right

windows 98 works great in certain situations such as on machines in the 1 ghz or below range becuase they cant fly with xp but with 98 they get user friendly options and interface, here you cant beat it
but on my modern rig it just goes to crap
as you have said, herophsycho, 98 cant handle 512megs of ram, it needs drivers for everything, it is part 16 part 32bit so it is unstable by nature, it has been steadily loosing support for modern games and apps like doom3 and certain utilities for my asus videocard as well as drivers for my onboard ethernet and sound

^(-.-)~~~]>:}>

I hope someone reads this, how many times can ppl not learn about ME.

There is only one thing wrong with this version of windows.

AND THAT IS YES YOU GUESSED IT

THE USER

Learn how to build the thing, first.

Tune it and stabilize it.

One real neat tweak that me just loves. is this.

Once you have laoded ME in FULL and I mean in full not the express isntall but the full custom install with everything it gives you.

Update the OS when fully loaded first.
Install all the hardware drivers.
Than tell it its a network server and not a desktop computer.

Than watch the difference.

But remember one thing ME is best loaded on a clean drive.

And if any one thinks that ME was arehash or an inbetween than I sugest those ppl think again.

Regards

IF IT AINT BROKE, DONT FIX IT - SIGNATURE COURTESY OF BUZZ187

jam,

"...Microsoft will eventually be abandoning support for Win98, but ME will still be around. Actually, Win98 would have been dead a few months ago if it weren't for the multitude of cry-babies who refuse to give it up! ..."

That's one of the things, that upsets me. At the same time they did that, they decreased the support life cycle, of WinME. Boy, did I hear about that one ;-)

I won't get into a, "which is better" debate. It all comes down to, "what machine, is it going on", "'what' will it be used for", "setup properly", and is it "maintained", kept "updated".

*smiles* This is going to go on and on and on, about WinME. And no, you wont hear me trash it either. You will, however, hear me trash companies, for poorly written programs, that they say/claim, are for WinME*smiles*

Later,
I'll Try

bashing ME is not the point of this thread
so everybody who wants to chime in on it just keep your mouth shut

although im certainly having my problems with 98

maybe people dont realize that all OSs have problems

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

Your last comment is your best....all OSs have problems. ME got a bad name mainly through people who didn't understand the changes MS made in it and who thought they could carry on as before.

XP is better protected from the user and will correct many things we do to it! But it will still crash sometimes and MS has admitted that by providing much enhanced recovery tools in it.

Personally, I learn and read about an operating system if I am going to mess with it, I also keep a clone of my hard drive so I can just copy it back after I am finished messing, if I don't like the results.

But...I liked ME and never had any major trouble with it once I set it up as in my homepage on Burzurq. However, most of my systems are migrated to XP now to take advantage of better software which is not always as backwards compatible as it says (especially Symantec's!!). I like the stability, file/folder privacy and encryption of XP pro as well, when used with NTFS partitions.

I haven't abandoned good old ME yet, but the day draws closer. I've been experimenting with Linux too...now there's a rock solid OS, but it's still a bit of a hassle to get everything working properly, not really for the ordinary man in the street yet, in any of its distros.

Nice thread, giggles.

"im not making a point to rip on me and say that it totally sucks i was just wondering why it had so many bugs and why microsoft even released it"

I believe that was the ORIGINAL QUESTION... now its 15 posts later and we finally have an answer!

"bashing ME is not the point of this thread
so everybody who wants to chime in on it just keep your mouth shut"
I would think that you guys would have known better..... Listen...... just because you told me not to...... I wont "bash ME" although I would very much like to :)

Anyway, your original question was why does it have so many bugs?

Well we obviously know that M/E is win 98 overwritten.... What you might NOT know, is that it was quickly done to meet its release.... I have it.... And I use it every day... And I hate it more than anything. And of course you may be wondering.. "If you hate it so much why dont you use a different O/S?"

Heheh, I will be able to soon, when I finally get a comp of my own thats why.

"The only thing wrong with M/E is the user"
What will it take to get those words out of MY MOUTH? A cold day in hell.
Anyone with knowledge of O/S's know that ME is crap....... very buggy as well as unstable...... But I'm not bashing it im laying out the facts....

You can argue it all you want but you CANT FIGHT THE FACTS!

hey, samzee, that was exactly the point of that statement
you are the user. you have a problem with the OS, this does not mean that it is crap to everyone
you have your issues with it while others seem to find that it works great for them
and yes you were bashing it

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

Heheh, yeah I guess I was "bashing it" a bit, heh. Im just laying out the facts though... It doesnt give me thaaaaaaaaaaaaaat many problems... But Im saying it COULD be better.

yeah windows 98 could be better too

what is painfully obvious to one person might be just painful to the other

Yeah, '98 could be improved as far as buggy-ness goes..... But I think 98 is pretty stable though.

well, it is a hell of a lot more stable than win 95, but then again what isnt?

hey, i just got XP Pro today! its pretty nice except that i feel lost! and i cant get my pata to sata adapter to work eventhough ive installed the driver and all the cables correctly, it worked when i was using win98

"Win98 would have been dead a few months ago if it weren't for the multitude of cry-babies who refuse to give it up!"

its still not dead, jam, i plan on dual booting 98SE and XP Pro, the best of both worlds!

^(-.-)~~~]>:}>

Right click on the taskbar, go to toolbars and check "desktop". This will install a little chevron arrow on the right which gives you access to all desktop shortcuts, to my computer and to my documents. Now you won't feel so lost!

Many things are the same but just in different places. You still get to device manager by right clicking on my computer, only now it's in the start menu and you still set video and appearance by right clicking on the desktop and going to properties.

A lot of people have asked me to write a "How to run XP well" like the ME guide I wrote, but it would just have one line:

"Leave it alone and do what it wants you to - then it works fine." :)