Reasons why YOU dont like WindowsME

[agentLX]

I heard many comments on WindowsME, that is, it is somehow buggy, crappy, and other negative stuffs.

In a conference, a Microsoft staff labeled it Windows MEsirable.
So, I think the best way to hear everything is from HERE. :)

[PrntRhd]

Windows ME started out a bit flawed, 98SE with a System Restore but that did not always work right. The drivers may or may not be the same for 98, and then it got worse: MS announced XP was coming out and hardware manufacturers decided to not work on ME drivers and concentrated on XP. It became an ORPHAN OS at that point, but the PC OEMs kept pushing their boxes out the door with this OS. Amazingly some of these were the only ones with ME that worked right.
Users who tried to upgrade to ME from 98 found that step was a disaster, it was very hard to get it to work, making the OS even less desirable.
Even if it was setup properly, it was an OS with 98's poor memory control with the bloat of system restore added.

[agentLX]

1. System Restore - it never even work
2. Poor memory control
- i found this true

but as with the drivers, it had a lot more convinience than win98

anymore? thanx :)

[jlreich]

I can't give any technical reasons why ME sucks, but I can say that every ME machine I have had or worked on has had many problems constantly crashing.

I did a clean install on my kids computer several years ago. BSOD from the beginning. All MS updates and it still crashed. Not even any software on it yet. Plenty of ram (320MB). I lasted about a month before I put 98se back on it. A couple months later I went ahead and put XP on it. No problems after that. ;)

I cringe when someone wants me to work on their machine and they tell me they have ME. :eek:

[deddard]

I cringe when someone wants me to work on their machine and they tell me they have ME. :eek:

First machine I got paid to work on was running ME................on a Compaq! Do you think we should charge danger money for the stress involved? :D
Needless to say the remedy was upgrade!

[agentLX]

every ME machine I have had or worked on has had many problems constantly crashing.

Can you please give some description of CRASHING that you've experience?

[jlreich]

Lets see it's been awhile. With my kids machine it would BSOD sometimes just out of nowhere, and never regain stability. Sometimes it did regain stability, but if it did it would usually start to BSOD again very soon and have to be rebooted anyway. Not doing anything out of the ordinary when it gives you the BSOD.

I suppose it is pretty much the same with other ME machines I have worked on. I assume it has a lot to do with the poor memory control. Sorry I can't give you something more specific. But it has been awhile. And you know how the human brain tries to repress bad memories. LOL :p

May I ask why you want to know? I have a guy at work that still uses ME on his home PC. He isn't very computer savvy at all but I could ask him what kind of issues he has had. Might give some clues if it is important. I cleaned off some malware for him several months ago. But I only had it for a couple of days. If i recall correctly it did BSOD on me at least once, but I don't remember the specifics. I think I was installing new AV on it at the time (AVG), but not sure.

[123456]

If you have the 2gb space, get 2000. If you have a newer pc, (5 years or newer), get xp. Old PC's are best with 98.

[agentLX]

May I ask why you want to know?

I just wanna confirm if it is WinMEsirable or just WinMalignEd

Just give an idea, i got several machines* running WinME, i did it coz it readily supported the drivers. and since the users are'nt power users, maybe running MS office and other little stuff, with anti virus of course. I had not xperience any BSOD/GPF yet.

but what i noticed was (by system monitor of winme) the cpu usage is always at 100% even though i had closed some user apps. (which in comparison with win98se is not same given the same circumstances).


*AMD 1 GHZ
128 DDR
onboard video/sound/lan

[123456]

What are these system specs? Their RAM and processor speed?

[Budfred]

I have used WinME on a couple of computers and managed on a couple more... I have never had a big problem with it... It had BSOD as often as Win9x and mostly was stable most of the time... I also tweak it after installing to make it a bit more stable... I don't remember what the tweaks are anymore, but I do know they weren't terribly complex...

[classicsoftware]

I have a notebook with ME. Not a single problem related to the OS. Does PnP better than 98se. Built in USB support, no drivers required. Works like a charm and it's been running for over 5 years.....

[Paul Komski]

I too used WinME for a couple of years on a desktop and like classicsoftware still have it on a laptop. Never had any particular problems with it (in fact I rather liked it) and used to always turn off system restore because it was a resource hog and which was a prime reason that it was often referred to a MemoryEater. I like the fact you can simply plug in flash drives and have them work and the native support for compressed folders but dont like the difficulty in tweaking it to reboot into true DOS.

[agentLX]

To Classic, Paul, Bud...had you noticed this one

but what i noticed was (by system monitor of winme) the cpu usage is always at 100% even though i had closed some user apps. (which in comparison with win98se is not same given the same circumstances). with system restore off


ok for now lets add...
1. MemoryEater
2. WinME is good in usb support

[saphalline]

Hmmm... my experiences with WinME have been horrible.

The first PC I built was before WinXP, so I got ME (back in my naiive days). That was an undesireable situation. Granted I'm a gamer, so that might make a difference, but it would BSOD on me a lot. And not just when gaming, it would also do so at random, like jlreich mentioned. A couple months later, WinXP came out, I switched to that, and I didn't have another BSOD for several months (and even then it was due to OC'ing).

I've also seen several other systems running ME, with much of the same symptoms. I eventually associated excessive BSOD'ing with WinME. I admit that I haven't tried the registry tweaks with ME that are supposed to greatly improve its stability, but I have always turned off system restore with little to no affect on reducing BSOD's. Reading this thread, I'm wondering if perhaps WinME is actually a sensitive OS that works on some PC's and not on others, if only because I've never seen any good ME stories, much less all of these! Yes, it does have the USB support going for it, but do I really want to risk a BSOD while my flash drive is being written to? I think not!

98SE, 2000, and XP are my favorite Windows versions because they've been the most stable in my experience. 95 and ME have given me nothing but trouble! NT I don't have much experience with.

[Paul Komski]

I'm a gamer, so that might make a difference
That could well be part of it - I'm not a gamer. My own desktop was not OEM but an "I built it" with 512RAM and a 1.4GHzAMD. Full retail version of WinME was in use on both it and the Laptop (a 2nd hand bottom of the end Dell).

I'm well aware of the large bad press that WinME received - but never experienced it for myself.

[Budfred]

To Classic, Paul, Bud...had you noticed this one



ok for now lets add...
1. MemoryEater
2. WinME is good in usb support
Yes I noticed that... It was not my experience...

I looks like you are trying to verify that WinME is junk and there are lots of people on the web that will tell you that with a lot of passion, so again, I am not sure why you bothered to start this topic... Not everyone has a bad experience with WinME, but most techies will tell you it is junk...

[agentLX]

I looks like you are trying to verify that WinME is junk...
I am not sure why you bothered to start this topic...

We're trying to bring in some LIGHT here, Sir, we're not junking anything! As I had said i had machines that run on ME.

But sometimes we have to make recommendations (ie. hardware software etc.) to other people (...people outside this forum), I'm just clearing things out.

[Quantax]

My own horrendous experience with ME occurred when attempting to fix my cousin's husband's laptop where it was the OS. I went into msconfig to delete some programs that he didn't think were that essential as startups.
I then got one of those awful error messages("must reinstall Windows because explorer.exe missing" or some such thing). Everything I tried failed, couldn't get into Safe mode. So I wound up paying for his then taking it to some local repair shop which managed to fix it(though I never learned exactly what they did).

[saphalline]

other people (...people outside this forum)There are people outside the forums!? :eek: Where??

I definitely think that ME is not suitable for gaming. It corrupted quite a few of my save game files for various games. But the frequent BSOD's (in my experience) do indeed seem odd. Perhaps that the act of installing a game made it do that to me, because like I said it would BSOD even when doing mundane office tasks, but it's more likely that ME just needs a bit more work than most of the other versions of Windows. There exists a registry tweaking guide (several probably) specifically on trimming ME down to a manageable and stable OS that rivals 98SE (with the added benefits of USB support, etc). Now registry tweaking should only be done by someone who knows what they're doing, but as long as you follow the instructions exactly you should be safe.

This is all getting me rather interested again because I long ago wrote off my copy of ME as being a bad OS, but I still have it (having never wanted to foist it off on someone else) and it might be worth a try to experiment with it again... Who knows, maybe I can get it stable this time!

FYI - My original ME config: Athlon T-bird 1.2/266, Crucial 256MB PC2100, Asus A7V266-E mobo, GeForce2 Ti 64MB, 60GB IBM 60GXP (one of the few "Deathstar" hard drives that didn't die), Pioneer slot-load DVD drive, Mitsumi floppy drive. Wow, I still remember the specs to the first PC I built...

[sea69]

I LOVED winME--- it made me a LOT of $$ fixing it when I ran a pc shop.

;)

[123456]

NT, i never used. 95, it always worked fine for me, *but I haven't really used it in a year or so.* 98 was very good, but I thought it focused primarily on new themes and such rather than a better OS< (although it is more stable than 95).
Millenium is crap. I had it on my desktop back in 2000-ish and it sucked. Had to reboot once a day.
Windows 2000 is by far my favorite OS. Ever. I love it so much. The lock pc, the functionality.....I'm considering formatting my old 450MHz to it. Or should I choose 98?
XP is bloated. It's very stable, but the windows network is more than 2x slower than 2000's.
Longhorn seems nice and stable, but it requires RAM. More than 512mb. I have a triple boot set up on my PC, (longhorn, 2000 Pro, and XP Pro).

[saphalline]

450MHz is more than enough for 2000. Orion and I had an old Pentium Pro 200 running Win2K just fine. 450 should be even better. Just make sure you give it plenty of RAM. 128MB is enough for 2000, but 256MB is the best. Anything over that is almost wasted except for the programs you run, unlike WinXP which sucks up RAM until you get over 768MB. :rolleyes:

Even so, as long as the power is there to run it, I still like XP. And Longhorn won't be so bad, but it will force the OEM's to suddenly include a lot of RAM! :p 512MB minimum, huh? Wasn't 128MB the minimum for XP? People might start to wonder about this. Heck, most people still think that 512MB of RAM is monstrous!! :p

[sea69]

The lock pc, the functionality.....I'm considering formatting my old 450MHz to it. Or should I choose 98?
XP is bloated

winXP has the "lock function" too. I like that winXP has most drivers that win2k does not.

;)

[poppy]

450MHz is more than enough for 2000. Orion and I had an old Pentium Pro 200 running Win2K just fine. 450 should be even better. Just make sure you give it plenty of RAM. 128MB is enough for 2000, but 256MB is the best. Anything over that is almost wasted except for the programs you run, unlike WinXP which sucks up RAM until you get over 768MB. :rolleyes:

Even so, as long as the power is there to run it, I still like XP. And Longhorn won't be so bad, but it will force the OEM's to suddenly include a lot of RAM! :p 512MB minimum, huh? Wasn't 128MB the minimum for XP? People might start to wonder about this. Heck, most people still think that 512MB of RAM is monstrous!! :p
123456, I agree with saphalline. I run W2K with an AMD K6-2 400 and has been very stable. I originally was running it with only 256MB of RAM but my photo editing software was having problems keeping up. The manufacturer recommended 512MB of RAM. I needed the RAM in a hurry but local sources only had 128MB modules available in stock. So I went with 3 of those modules (BTW my system will only support 768MB RAM) and now with 384MB I have had no resource problems and the system is very stable.

[123456]

Woo. I find it very hard to clog my 512mb RAM, *unless I try to run photoshop and then 10 other apps).
Longhor, i formatted it and removed from the boot.ini. TOo slow. XP's minimum was 64mb RAM.