Is Windows Me any good

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Is Windows Me any good?

No, avoid it like the plague, do not touch it even with a ten foot pole, desist any inclination to try this OS, stay away from it like it was a dog with fleas, recoil in horror lest it touch thy hard drive, keep clear in case it reduces your computer to slag, and if all else fails...............

Run away and hide.

Ed Almos

Whip me, beat me, just don't Windows Me!

I have been running 2000 on my computer as long as i had it. I never had a problem with my computer accept for 2 viruses. Even that was only because Norton is a good for nothing Antivirus.
It only takes me 10 Seconds to boot my computer. I never had a problem with internet being slow or anything.

What problem are you trying to solve, gamefreak?

I'm probably not adding much to the thread, but I concur the unanimous notion that Windows ME should generally be avoided. As folks have already mentioned, it's more than a bit wonky, and driver support never solidified for it. I've known various people who have, uh, upgraded to ME from 98, only to find that most of their peripherals stopped working properly. Compared to Win98, ME caused more problems than it was worth, and most of what was actually supposed to be good about ME was retrofitted to 98 in the second edition. Windows ME was not one of Microsoft's finest moments.

I'd say Windows 2000 is a reasonably solid OS; it's based on the NT source line, which is quite a bit more robust and secure than anything in the 9x/ME line. You've got a much more solid kernel, real user accounts, and NFTS offers sevearl enhancements. [9x/ME were basically DOS with a fancy GUI and slightly enhanced FAT based file systems.] I assume you keep it up to date with service packs and what not; it's in sustained engineering mode until 2010.

A possible drawback of Win2k is that it is not the most ideal OS for gaming [and I'm considering your handle, here]. If you want something that might be a bit better for gaming than Win2k, I concur with dumbgenius, Windows 98 Second Edition is the way to go. But I wouldn't necessarily recommend switching from 2k to 98SE; it all comes down to what problem you're trying to solve.

Any way you can cram a bit more memory in there? If you can find it [with a bit of luck], memory for a computer that old would be practically free at a second-hand computer shop. 2k does like to have more memory than 98SE.

What i have been trying to do is make it were i can play my MS-DOS
games like Commander Keen w/ functioality and sound.

First off, make sure you've tried the latest DOSBox, I've seen HUGE speed improvements with it. Though my machine is much faster than yours, it's worth a try.

If that doesn't work, I would have to recommend Windows 98 for running DOS apps, specifically Second Edition. ME worked fine for me when I tested it on Microsoft Virtual PC, but then, I've heard of a few other people who had no problems with it when running on ideal hardware. I saw one machine running it where it informed us that it had removed several of its own critical files and that it would like to be reinstalled. There was no install medium, unfortunately,

If you do go with 98, I would initially connect it to the Internet to ensure you have all stability updates to the product via Windows Update. Once you've done this, disable your ethernet adapter in the device manager and never connect it to the Internet again. 98's no longer supported by Microsoft, and there are some severe, known holes that Microsoft won't patch due to end of support. All they offer via Windows Update now are the updates that were made before the end of support. Same goes with ME. If you have any desire to use Windows on the Internet, keep your copy of 2000 around. Do not browse any untrusted pages with any version of 9x.

And of course, all this is impossible without hardware that works with 98 in the first place. See if you can find drivers for 98 for your critical devices before you even think about doing this. You might have better luck with vanilla DOS, for which you'd primarily just need sound card and mouse drivers, and generic ones will probably work there. Either one should run the DOS apps fine, but 98 would be easier to set up and DOS would provide a more authentic experience if you're into that.

Regardless of what you decide, including DOS/9x in a multiboot setup is much more of a challenge than just Windows NT and Linux. Prepare to be without your computer for a few days while you figure out why you're getting strange errors, etc. In particular, there's a bug in Windows 98 where if you have a second hard drive and that drive contains no partition readable by 98, it will ask you to insert the CD into the unreadable hard drive before you can continue, which, of course, is impossible. If this is the case, you'll have to either temporarily put a FAT16/32 partition on the second drive until you finish installing 98, or physically open up the computer to remove the second hard drive temporarily if the former cannot be done. Have another machine or a friend who can look stuff up for you online in case you get any weird errors like this. My experiences installing Windows 98 on modern machines were not pleasant, but then again, the machine was built for XP, not for 2000, so it might go easier on you. Least you won't have my ram problem. I had to physically remove a stick of ram because the fact that I had a gig made it complain that I had "insufficient memory to install Windows 98" or something to that effect. Again, I recommend against ME, which is known to be even less stable. 98 at least runs fine once installed.

Back in my hacking and game playing days, I found that many dissamemblers don't work correctly under Win2K and would simply close when programs are run under debug. WinME was the last OS that allowed me to use W32DSM fully. I also found some older games wouldn't run right on Win2K.

I have a computer that has Windows ME and it gaves me no problems at all and it is fast ! !

Maybe you should try FreeDOS for running old DOS games:
www.freedos.org

I hate ME i would sooner eat radioactive waste by the spoon than use ME ever i used it once and within 5 mins i had critical system errors so i went back to 98SE before i eventually decided to flirt over to XP once they got all the main issues sorted hence why i wont use vista will it's been out a while.

Avoid ME like it's the end of the world though if the nuclear missile command was using ME we prob would be dead LOL

cya people

Windows ME is best avoided full stop, we have 5 workstations in the office at work, 3 networked machines running XP pro, working fine, one really old Pentium based thing running Windows 95, again no problems, maybe because of it not having a lot on it, now onto the last machine, it runs ME, and it constantly has to be rebooted, hell I saw a blue screen on it yesterday, my boss gets a little irate with it because it is so useless and as I'm not a qualified IT engineer I can't do any technical work to the computers

We also have a server, presumably running Server 2003, which makes a racket, but isn't as troublesome as the ME box