Windows ME was infamous for many things... but why for crashing?
Posted by ZetaformGames@reddit | vintagecomputing | View on Reddit | 66 comments
I'm already aware of the many reasons why ME failed. Mostly because it was a minor Windows 98SE facelift with the removal of real mode MS-DOS support.
However, one thing that I see get brought up a lot is its instability, and how it "crashed so often." Wasn't Windows 9x in general already infamous for this?* Why is ME suddenly getting all the blame? Is it because of the MS-DOS support being dropped?
Windows ME actually brought some things to the table that we take for granted. Most notably, System Restore and multimedia applications. But the rest of the operating system felt so underwhelming in comparison that it wasn't worth using. (That, and I think System Restore didn't work after a certain date. It's the thought that counts, right...?)
*I also want to know why Windows 9x was so crash-prone in general. Part of me wonders if the implementation of synchronous multitasking for the 32-bit processes was a factor, considering the operating system still used cooperative multitasking for the 16-bit processes.
Ill_Assistant_9543@reddit
It's due to half-baked WDM drivers. A lot of existing hardware at the time of ME was forced to suddenly compile WDMs for ME and 2000.
Result? VXD-shimmed-WDMs.
I personally find ME far more stable than 98SE on Pentium Ms. What most people don't know is ME's ACPI and WDM advantage. If you tried running both on 915PM chipsets or anything newer, ME always takes the cake.
ME only really runs best on Pentium 4s with full WDMs or newer, anything older is just a gamble.
cvbnm-7@reddit
It was rushed IMO. it had an 11 month development window
ShadowGuyinRealLife@reddit
I have read several articles about people claiming 98 also crashed a lot before SE and that retro Windows 98 enthusiasts who run it on virtual machines or even used an old install disk use SE. I don't have the inclination to run VMs just to see which is better in blue screens of death per hour so I can't verify these claims, but if true it means that Windows 98 on release version was actually worse than Windows Me.
To be honest I don't know why ME would crash so much and 98 doesn't get the same reputation unless ME was really just that bad, but since it was supposed to be the final line of 9X it should have logically been an improvement. I bet if Windows Me support continued to 2004, it would get something like SE upgrades so even if Windows ME was somehow worse than 98, it would end up being better by end of life.
But let's be honest, even if Microsoft wanted to do that, everyone already moved onto XP anyways. Computers became obsolete every 3 years if you wanted to play games so even people who liked ME would eventually buy a new machine.
ShadowGuyinRealLife@reddit
I know some people say Windows ME was just a 98 facelift and the project development suggested they were making a service pack for 98 when they decided they needed a product for the start of the millennium so there is probably some truth to that. However if it was just 98 with some minor improvements and a facelift, it really shouldn't be considered a total failure. Incremental improvements are not nothing. However when I ask older users, the thing they most often remember Windows ME was "crash, crash, crash." One of them joked a great thing Windows ME introduced was system restore and he grew acquainted with it really quick. And this is what puzzles me, if it is just 98 with a facelfit, shouldn't it have offered some improvments?
chuckop@reddit
It became fashionable to bash Windows ME. It wasn’t any more or less prone to crashing as Windows 98 SE. But given that Windows 2000 (AKA NT 5.0) came out right afterward, it didn’t get much exposure, and the computer press was dissing ME and advocating Windows 2000.
Source: Me. I worked on both systems as a member of Windows 98 team, and later NT5 GUI team.
bronzejr@reddit
Hey Man, I'm trying to get ahold of whoever was over the Windows Me commercial I want to use those transition cubes as part of my documentary I'm creating. I wanted to contact Microsoft because the original video was only 240p so I was hoping the original high-quality source file would be somewhere. Anyone you know I should contact or could you get me started in the right direction? Or is it even worth trying to get it since it might be gone?
chuckop@reddit
Definitely not gone, but will be difficult to get anything better. The originals are likely with the ad agency. Weadon+Kennedy was the primary agency through 1999. I’m not certain if they did Windows Me.
However, would you have the rights to use anything you found.
Since you are creating a documentary, contact media relations:
https://news.microsoft.com/microsoft-public-relations-contacts/
redditshreadit@reddit
Wikipedia has Windows 2000 coming out before Windows ME.
bronzejr@reddit
It did, he made a mistake
SuperVGA@reddit
Wasn't ME marketed for hone use whereas Windows 2000 had a better all-round reach, marketing wise?
Trying to use NT5 to run games was a big chore and often ended in me giving up. ME/9x was what games were made for.
AnotherBasicHoodrat@reddit
Windows 2000 was the first to have the 'Professional' version and it was oriented towards businesses
redditshreadit@reddit
I thought Windows 2000 ran Windows games similar to Win 9x. DOS games however require DOS.
wrosecrans@reddit
Win ME may not have been that much crashier than any Win9x. But the standards of comparison moved the goalposts a lot over those ~5 years. Win 95 was compared to Win 3.1 and Mac System 7 when it came out, and it was clearly no worse than the competition. Win ME was being compared to NT, Linux, and the almost-released new Unix based Mac OS. The expectations were a lot higher.
compu85@reddit
I have to disagree with ME being as stable as 98se. A fresh ME install is faster than 98SE, and ran well. But as it aged, something would happen and it would get super unstable. Sometimes the registry would corrupt itself. I saw this play out over and over on school computer labs, and personal machines I fixed.
manvscar@reddit
I had a similar experience. ME absolutely crashed more often than 98SE.
ZetaformGames@reddit (OP)
I still love the GUI design of Classic Windows over anything modern, especially XP. You lot did a great job.
chuckop@reddit
Thank you, but mine was a very small part of the whole. I got to work alongside some truly people.
Marco-YES@reddit
I miss the Windows Classic UI.
feel-the-avocado@reddit
It was perfectly fine and simply a face lift for Windows 98SE except it had a couple of extra applications included (movie maker) and also had system restore built into it.
Personally i went from windows 98SE across to Windows 2000 Professional before XP but when repairing customer computers, i found it to be no worse than 98SE. It was just a fashionable fad to discredit ME.
Windows vista is the one that actually deserves the hate.
bronzejr@reddit
Really?? yea I heard Windows Me is actually not that bad
feel-the-avocado@reddit
It could do so many of the things
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZibaOJID5DI
bronzejr@reddit
I absolutely love the Promo. Who uploaded it and what did it get upscaled to?
feel-the-avocado@reddit
It was a 240p file on the original installation disc. Appears to have been ai upscaled to 720p
billFoldDog@reddit
As a rule, the "unstable windows releases" got much more stable within a year or two of release. Performance issues get resolved, too.
bronzejr@reddit
Which got overlooked because XP was about to come out
jtsiomb@reddit
I see many people saying that WinMe wasn't crashing more often than Win98SE. That was certainly not my experience at all. It tried to do a little bit too much on top of the shitty win 9x base, and as a result it was unstable as hell. WinMe was what finally convinced me to switch over to NT (win2k) and the comparison was of course night and day. But that goes for any other win9x as well.
bronzejr@reddit
You were gonna be crossing over anyway buddy because that's all it was going to be
luis-mercado@reddit
The 9x arch was prone to suffer from what was known at the time as DLL and VxD hell. In a nutshell: dynamic libraries and device drivers all trying to use the same memory space, glitching apps at best and corrupting memory and causing the entire system to BSoD at worst.
From this era, ME had the worst fame thank to its shortcomings (terrible DOS support for a system running on top of it). As a transitional OS some drivers needed to be rewritten because old version causes severe crashes; it was Vista before Vista.
On top of that, many users considered it was a redundant and superfluous release since not even a year prior MS released the Second Edition of Windows 98 that was a lot more stable (for a 9x OS) and had full DOS support, so many wondered what was the purpose of ME in the first place.
In the long run it didn’t even help developers to adjust to a new driver model since Windows 2000 already existed, at the time was considered the most stable Windows ever and was fully NT.
bronzejr@reddit
Cash grab to hold people over for Windows XP.
CzechWhiteRabbit@reddit
Simply put, Windows ME, was like the Sun or daughter of overly, demanding Asian parents. The operating system itself, was perfectly fine for the time. But people put all of these expectations onto it, to basically be the next benchmark of operating systems. Windows ME, actually stood for millennium addition. Then there was Windows 2000.
So, Windows ME was basically The next step, after Windows 98. But, the next operating system above, was Windows NT, which introduced the NTFS for the first time. NT, which literally stood for new technology. It utilized a different core, then the DOS based operating systems, from Windows 31, and 98. And even 95. It also seeked, to merge MS-DOS, which was the physical operating system, with Windows, which was just a program that ran on the operating system. While, you could still access DOS as a logout option, on 95, 98, ME.. with a little simple registry hack.
Windows ME, was moving to make things load faster. So that's why they basically merged everything into just a few core drivers. And core DLLs. And everything worked encapsulated. The reason the damn thing crashed so often, was if one of those processes inside those containers, went nutty, it would bring the whole thing down. Kind of like, when someone in your cubicle has a meltdown, then the whole cubicle gets evacuated. Same logic. Or, using Microsoft's own analogies, a forest. And say each one of those trees, represents a DLL encapsulation, and within each tree, you have squirrels, and those squirrels are your processes running. Say one of those squirrels, realizes he wants to mate with one of the other squirrels, then the other squirrels catch wind of what he's trying to do, and well we've all seen it... The other thing was the concept was excellent, but there he wasn't enough memory to do everything that it needed to have. Cuz if you had like 128 MB of RAM. Windows ME would run pretty respectively. 128 meg of RAM, 900 megahertz processor, 10 GB hard drive. You were smoking!
But on the flip side, 98 and ME, had one very good secret feature if you knew how to do it. You could literally rebuild Windows, and it would rebuild all of the messed up files. And it would repair the operating system to run good, and you would never lose anything you install. With like say a clean format. So that was the great grandfather, of today's system restore.
A side note, Windows ME, stiffer millennium edition. Then there was Windows 2000. That was the start of the integration of Windows, also as the operating system. With Windows 2000. Brand named 2000. That's why they had Windows 2K, and Windows 2K professional. Then you also had all of the weird passion projects, like Windows NT, terminal. To connect to servers. And it never really worked right. Then you had all the different flavors of windows 2000 server. So a lot of things they took, from that original Windows 2K, and use that as the core for the concept of a dedicated server operating system within Windows. Starting with Windows 2003 server. Or, Windows XP 64-bit edition, service pack 3. You want to see some magic, make a virtual machine for Windows XP 64-bit. Running Windows XP, with over 8 gigs of RAM... The simplicity of Windows XP, moving at the speed of light!
bronzejr@reddit
They actually said it doesn't stand for millennium edition. It really does just stand for ME
bronzejr@reddit
yea me wasn't really planned. They wanted to stop after Windows 98se
Future-Side4440@reddit
Win 95 / 98 / Me crashed so often that Microsoft eventually set up the filesystem repair tool “scandisk” to run every time the system crashed.
“Because Windows was not shut down correctly, the file system needs to be checked for errors.”
Windows 2000 was not a great Me replacement. Very few things worked well with it. I seem to recall that multimedia support sucked, and it was a huge memory and CPU hog for the time. If you wanted to play games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, you’d want to reboot into DOS.
Both windows 2000 and XP generally required ignoring administrative restrictions for things to work properly. So the security of NTFS was mostly useless and just a hindrance.
bronzejr@reddit
You have a different take man. I don't seem to agree
paralyse78@reddit
Windows 95/98 were not necessarily inherently more crash-prone than other operating systems of their era. Since they were the most popular, the most users would have had exposure to them, and therefore those many people would have all experienced a crash at some time or another. The biggest problem with Win95/98 was the crash RECOVERY. Unlike NT or an OS running with a VM architecture a single application running under W95/W98 could destabilize the entire operating system to where it just entered an endless crash loop. And since FAT32 did not have any of the file system protections of NTFS, if the crash affected hard disk data (e.g. interrupting cached read/write operations) that data could be permanently lost as well.
Other operating systems of the era (various UNIX and BSD flavors, Mac OS, Windows NT, OS/2 Warp) offered more robust memory management, fault tolerance, and fault recovery. They did crash, of course, but when there was a crash, it was rare for those crashes to destabilize the entire operating system; usually the offending application could be terminated and restarted.
I worked as a tech for a number of years and to be fair to Microsoft a good number of Win95/Win98 crashes were more symptomatic of hardware issues or issues caused by aftermarket drivers than of problems with the operating system itself. A lot of times when I had customers who would complain about frequent BSOD's I'd find an underlying problem with the video card, RAM, or motherboard itself to be the source of the fault, or a buggy .DRV or .DLL file installed by third-party device drivers or software.
ZetaformGames@reddit (OP)
Something tells me that the CIH virus abused this lack of memory protection to attack.
Either way, the bad taste that Win9x left in everyone's mouth seems to be a talking point of Windows, even today. The Mac vs PC campaign is a prime example of this, but it still spread far and wide across the Internet. And it being based on MS-DOS rather than being its own OS certainly didn't help matters.
paralyse78@reddit
Windows 98 was actually a decent OS. I'd consider it the best one before XP.
Windows 95 OSR2 fixed a lot of the issues with earlier releases but it was still not as stable as W98.
bronzejr@reddit
Windows 98 or Windows 98se?
Psy1@reddit
It still did weird things like being case insensitive while NTFS is case sensitive (something Windows still hasn't fixed) and causes problems when other OSs are dealing with Windows files and expects Windows code to be case sensitive because NTFS is as is every other OS on the planet that is not Windows that is still in use.
lproven@reddit
NTFS is case preserving but not case sensitive.
Psy1@reddit
Giving the OS deals with arguments then it is case sensitive, Linux can use NTFS as a case sensitive file system no problem.
lproven@reddit
Can you give me an example of a Windows command where the command arguments are case-sensitive?
Psy1@reddit
It is more with file explorer, the command line is case sensitive so case sensitive arguments can be passed. Thus if you create files that are identical except for their case then in the command line everything works normal but file explorer gets confused and very buggy.
Potential_Copy27@reddit
ME, if anything, did have problems - imho it really came down to a pressed schedule and probably some bad decisions along the way. OS-wise, it was a bit of a rush job as well.
Originally the plan was to have "Windows 2000 Home" (codenamed Neptune) and "Windows 2000 Advanced Server" (Odyssey), but as the Neptune project faced delays, it and Odyssey was rolled into the "Whistler" project - what would eventually become XP.
Neptune was what ME should have been originally, but what we got was essentially a service pack for windows 98 with some parts removed and some parts just straight up broken.
ME was very much an interim OS in the 5 months between it and Windows XP, which I don't think helped impressions either. On one hand, you had a lot of stuff not work on ME that worked on 95/98 (a breach of expectations if you will), on the other, you had XP coming out rather soon (giving the impression of a "quick fix").
ME does work okay, so long as you don't rely on DOS or dig too deep into the default system files and settings, and if you run on consumer hardware of the period (say a P2/P3 based system) without too much exotic hardware in there. It was an OK "mom & pop" OS.
But - ME was also rather more inflexible than 98 and XP were, and was pretty useless in an office or hybrid office/home setting. As I mentioned, a lot of stuff worked on 98, but was removed or unsupported on ME, giving that breach of expectation.
Windows 8 suffered much of the same fate - it breached the consumers' expectations (albeit more on the UI side of things), and got flagged as unstable or unusable. (Win8 was also almost universally hated on in IT departments at the time).
Both ME and 8 made the same mistake in the end - they became a hindrance to the pros that work with IT every day, which are also those who know how to complain to magazines, the public and Microsoft. Both are good OSes for home use in the end, but not in a professional environment.
So, tl;dr - imho ME became a too much of a hindrance to those that were capable of helping others...
bronzejr@reddit
There was a year and one month in between ME and XP, but yes great point
mike3y@reddit
Crashed allll the time. By far the worse version of windows!
nmdt@reddit
Haven’t used ME back in the day, but actually like it for retro gaming on my Tualatin build. Late DOS games work even without reenabling DOS mode, and you get faster boot times and much faster network transfers (courtesy of the NT TCP/IP stack IIRC)
Add 98lite and you get a very responsive and light system
Of course my parts are fairly period-correct and use latest drivers so I definitely avoid a lot of the problems an average user would get back in the day.
2raysdiver@reddit
I don't remember it crashing so much as the driver issues. Someone got one for my mother-in-law. Every couple of weeks, it would uninstall the modem driver, or uninstall the printer driver and detect it as a scanner, or toss the video driver and revert to a generic video driver with 640x480 resolution. This was on a new PC with ME pre-installed. I looked into installing Win 98SE on it, but there were no drivers for Windows 98SE (except for the printer). The hardware was built specifically FOR windows ME. In the end, I took it off my MIL's hands, bought a case, power supply and motherboard/CPU/memory combo from Tiger Direct and built her a Win 98SE PC. She didn't complain about that PC.
I also had a friend with a Packard Bell (yeah, I know) that had all sorts of problems with ME driver issues.
mnlx@reddit
Maybe it crashed because it was an interim solution? Is kind of surprising that we still talk so much about a product line that covered the consumer PC market just from 1995 to 2001.
The future after DOS was supposed to be OS/2, then long story short Microsoft didn't see a clear pathway with IBM and bet on developing their own clean slate 32-bit OS even before the success of Windows 3.x took them by surprise.
NT was meant to be the basis of their operating systems and started shipping in 1993. It had high memory requirements and DOS compatibility wasn't the point. But then memory was very expensive and people wanted to run their DOS programs. So they're in 1992, NT isn't ready yet and it won't be suitable for consumers for a while, what can you do? You evolve WfW to pre-emptive 32-bit, fix that as much as you can in somewhat of a haste, keep the Win16 and DOS native or almost native bits on the same filesystem, introduce the desktop metaphor in the GUI, do market and usability studies and release something cheap to run that does the job. Reliability and soundness wasn't as important as that, and it worked.
ZestycloseAd2895@reddit
I always considered this a 6 year scapegoat cycle.
ME to be a test of XP Vista a test of Win7 Win 8 a test of Win10
2000 2006 2012
lproven@reddit
Nah. ME was unrelated to XP.
ME is based on the same DOS heritage as Windows 1.0 to 98SE.
XP is NT 5.1, when Windows 2000 was NT 5.0.
In your terms, which I don't really agree with but whatever, Windows 2000 was "the test of" XP.
ZestycloseAd2895@reddit
Good info
gnntech@reddit
ME actually brought a lot to the table that was adopted in newer versions of Windows. Some big ones I can think of in addition to System Restore are:
Support for natively opening zip and cab files directly in Windows Explorer. Prior to this, you needed a dedicated program like WinZip or PKZip to handle these files. It is possible to back port this functionality to Windows 2000 (which was released prior to ME) by copying some DLL files from ME to 2000.
Native Windows Update application. Prior to Windows ME, there was no integrated Windows Update process. You had to visit the Windows Update website and download/install updates through an ActiveX control. Windows ME introduced the modern Windows Update process we use today.
lproven@reddit
And FireWire support, too.
1mrpeter@reddit
Windows ME was a f... trash. Back then I was a part-time admin at one company. All they needed was MS Word, Internet explorer, really not more than that. Local news company. Myself, I had a bootleg win2k. All Win98 were working fine. Win2k more than fine; WinME was just trash just like Windows 11 nowadays or even worse.
spoonified@reddit
It wasn't as bad as its reputation. Overall it was basically the next step in the Win9x line but it did break compatibility with many older DOS games and programs. I think one of the things that didn't help it though is because it was out at the same time as Windows 2000 but was included on lower end consumer PCs where higher end systems usually were shipped with either Windows 98 or 2000. So generally Windows ME was almost exclusively on lower tear hardware which wouldn't be a reliable.
Scoth42@reddit
Me suffered a bit from the "Vista Problem" - if you had a decent, up to date system that had hardware with modern, WDM drivers and everything played nice, it offered some advantages over 98SE. Newer network stack, better USB, System Restore, better DirectX performance supposedly, handful of other things.
However, a lot of vendors stuck with using old hardware and old .386 and .VxD drivers dating back to Win9x and even Win3.x in some extreme cases, and it turned out they often didn't play nice with newer drivers and the newer systems in Me which led to a somewhat more unstable system than you'd have otherwise. If you needed a full on real mode DOS driver for some weird old hardware or the older drivers just didn't work, then you were stuck. Plus some vendors shipped it on machines that were just too underspecced for it so it ran badly because it did need a somewhat beefier system than a bare bones Win95 or 98/SE could run on.
Plus, like other people said, with the removal of Real Mode MS-DOS, you lost a fair portion of the troubleshooting ability you had in older Windows being able to exit to DOS and poke around stuff. There were tons of little problems Win9x had where a quick drop to DOS mode and tweak some config file or delete a broken DLL or something would fix it up, which the only way to do with WinMe was to create a boot floppy. And the various hacks to re-enable actual DOS on it came with their own issues.
As for the general crashiness of Win9x in general... I don't know that it exactly was, really, but part of it was the layers and layers of compatibility baked into it that it had to keep straight. Despite being "modern" for the time, it maintained nearly 100% compatibility with DOS programs, drivers, and stuff so there was a lot going on behind the scenes to keep that working. By design it had to allow more direct access to hardware and allow software to do some naughty things to work, because that's how DOS or Windows 3.x did it. There's a lot more moving parts to keep in sync and working properly, which it didn't always do especially if something misbehaved. Windows has also gotten a ton more self-healing and self-repairing over the years - even Windows 98 had the "System File Checker" that was supposed to scan and fix system files, but it's been pretty rare for it to do much for me. You could pretty easily completely bork up the system if, say, the install of IE4 with the Windows Desktop Update on Windows 95 got interrupted and left half-installed with mixed up components, or some program shoved an old DLL into the Windows System folder that fouled things up. These days it's a lot harder to completely break Windows from interrupted things, cancelled things, or mixed up things. Win9x also just tended to cope less well with the updates and addons shoved into it over the years, especially base Windows 95.
Back in my tech support days in the late 90s/very early 2000s sometimes we'd have to do things like uninstall IE as far back as we could (removed entirely in the case of most versions of WIndows 95, IE4 for Win98 original, etc), uninstall some updates like Dialup Networking 1.4 and Winsock 2.0 for WIn95, remove all the networking components in the Network control panel, and then laboriously reinstalll them all just to refresh the system.
ZetaformGames@reddit (OP)
That's, uh... not very good on the vendors' part. I do agree with you on the MS-DOS removal though. You didn't need to use some convoluted recovery environment, MS-DOS was its own operating system in and of itself.
VaxCluster@reddit
I actually never had issues with it. Ran it from around 2000-2008 with rarely any crashes. Ran the few pieces of software my family needed at the time, and ran a few games and emulators.
Eventually I upgraded that PC to XP because browsers and emulators were dropping 9X support.
redditshreadit@reddit
Windows 9x was developed by Microsoft where Windows NT was deceloped by a team hired from DEC.
chuckop@reddit
Not exactly. While Dave Cutler came from DEC, and he hired a couple of guys from DEC, but the bulk of the Windows NT team was folks who did OS/2.
ZetaformGames@reddit (OP)
Oh boy. I somehow completely forgot that you could just...bypass a Windows 9x BSOD.
If an event occurred that caused the system to display one, it would likely cause a chain reaction, even if you didn't "press any key to continue." The programs are still loaded into memory and code is still being executed.
Martipar@reddit
Windows Me was only as crap as 98SE the main issue is that is was utterly pointless, Win2K was superior and 98SE wasn't exactly old, I think, though i could be wrong, that XP had been announced or at least is was known about. Between 1994 and 2001 Microsoft released about one OS a year so it wasn't unusual for an OS to have a short shelf life but NT had been around long enough for people to know that Windows 2K being brought down to a home level with support for home computing things like DirectX (the greatest gift to mankind) it was clesr the end was nigh so adding another DOS based OS to the mix was like adding make up to a corpse.
Lumornys@reddit
Basically, WinME was the "worst of the two worlds": it had NT's level of DOS compatibility (that is, barely anything worked) but none of the NT's security and stability.
If you want to sacrifice DOS, why don't just use Win2K?
Psy1@reddit
Because Windows ME dropped support for older Dos drivers that were wrapped into a window driver. Manufactures did this to also have strait Dos drivers with little effort porting the driver then Windows ME broke all those drivers and you had people rocking stuff like old SCSI from long defunct manufactures so no strait Windows driver were going to be made.
This meant if you had to go through through the pain of modernizing your parts to be compatible with Windows ME why not just go the extra mile and go for Windows 2000.
ZetaformGames@reddit (OP)
Dang. Well, that would certainly do it.
I know many joke acronyms have been created for this OS already, but based on all of the MS-DOS compatibility being stripped I might as well call it "missing edition."