Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition a.k.a. Windows ME is the shortest-lived Windows that ever existed. The total time it was on the market was only 11 months, but even given it’s super-short tenure it frustrated and angered people to no end.
Noted in the video below, the primary reasons why WinME ticked people off left and right was primarily due to the following:
No real mode DOS
WinME has no way to "Restart in MS-DOS Mode", meaning if you had any legacy programs that required a ‘full’ DOS, you couldn’t run them. Anything DOS-based had to be run in the Windows environment, and if you ran out of memory, well, that was that and you were screwed.
Did not work with current hardware of the time
Similar to Vista’s woes on first launch, WinME had problems ‘understanding’ a fair amount of hardware. Things that ran right in Windows 98 would either run badly in WinME or not at all.
The worst of 98 and 2000 put into one Windows
Also mentioned in the video below, if you took the instability of 98 and the very poor DOS support of 2000 and lumped that into one Windows, you get WinME.
Is WinME good for retro computing?
No. If you want to go retro, you’re far better off with Windows 98SE or Windows 2000.
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I must be one of the very few (lucky) people for whom Windows ME worked pretty well. I think Windows 98SE was a better all-round OS at the time, but at least for the time I used it, ME worked just fine.It also looked kinda “snazzy” and you could see the direction they were heading for Windows XP.
Well, WinME worked all right on my ca 1998-made Compaq desktop – as long as it could reasonably be kept. Then, mainly for security reasons, it got replaced with Ubuntu. May it rest in peace!
I to must have been one of the lucky ones as well. Used ME for several years without a problem.