PC Mechanic, New Article

Posted: 04 Mar 2011 07:00 AM PST

winme 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.