Here is my story that may have happenned very well to lots of people and why they thought ME was crap :

In 2001 I bought a shiny blue-metallic and ultra-slim “Targa” Laptop with a Celeron 900 MHZ and 64 MB Ram, 15 GB HD.It had a DVD, and was one of the first Laptops withput serial parallelports and no floppy drive. It was very USB-centric, so it had a external floppy drive.

This machine was incredible expensive, although targa is really a “cheap” brand.I paid nearly 3500 Deutsche Mark for it ( around 1700,- Euro ). My first Laptop too. As a customer you expect to get the highest quality and the best modern OS on it available, isn’t it ? Mistaken by friend’s opinions I thought that Windows ME was jsut another name for Windows 2000 or a kind of NT-Home Edition.. tada..later I learned it was DOS and I was upset.

Anyway:
This thing came preinstalled with ME and had a recovery CDROM with the OS on it, but you could not do a custom setup, only wipe and make it factory-default ( like still today done by so many OEMs ).

The disk was so to say useless, it’s BIOS-lock made it even worthless for other PCs.
Windows ME was one of the first OS to have full ACPI support (98SE can have with /p j switch ) on compatible machines. But to have a working ACPI you need WDM drivers throughout the OS.

That targa-Laptop didn’t. It had some buggy drivers that made sleep and resume a pain. Sound after waking up was stuttering and I had video-related glitches when the CPU throttling was on.So I quickly came to the thinking that ME’s ACPI support was broken.

Microsft has released over time a lot of updated Acpi- system files to fix those issues ( issues that are all caused by BIOS and drivers and not by the OS ), Targa did never make them available or told me that there are even some available from MS.

Again I blamed the OS alone for my crap Laptop from a dubios company that I had paid so much money.

My external floppy was sometimes “missing” or ME’s device Manager told me the yellow exclamation mark and the System said that “Drive a is in MS-DOS comaptible mode”..

Today I know that this is indeed a bug in the USB-subsystem but there is also a patch available. Nobody told me at that time, too..

Then after some weeks using that machine, everywhere on the NEt people spoke of XP and how much better it will be. I ordered the Release Candiate (build 2505)from Microsoft for 25,- Deutsche Mark (12 Eur ) and when the CD came installed it. It ran on ultra low RAM ( 64 MB were even too few for ME ! ) but all my power and hardware issues were instantly cured.It was stable and reliable.

SO: Me had a life on that machine of less than 6 Months. Afterwards everybody talked of XP and how you must upgrade your machines with RAM for it. I never touched ME again, only now that I sometimes use older hardware I love it.

One note that everybody says ME is “beta” :

It shipped with prerelease versions of Windows Media Player 7.0 and Internet Explorer 5.5.

Explorer’s Active Desktop had issues with that IE and WMP used too much ressources..

Only some weeks later the final versions of IE 5.5 and WMP7 were out and cured the pains.

With IE 6Sp1 and WMP9 they are definately cured forever. So.

Even ubuntu 8.0.4 shipped with a firefox 3beta .. You see : MS gets blamed for such doing.

With enough Ram and fast CPU and ACPI-compatible BIOS ( same specs as for XP-compatible BIOS ) and WDM drivers you can get the most out of that OS and see why it failed back then :

- Machines were not powerful enough ( ME is good at 128 MB Ram, with 256 and more its a wild beast )
- ACPI was “new”, implementation from OEMs in their machines was buggy
-OEMs and Vendors thought that Win98 drivers would work on ME, they later realized that ME NEEDS WDM drivers. Same problem as with Vista : when it came out, nobody had drivers..
- Instead of giving full OS-CDs, most OEMs gave those dreadful Recovery-Disks, and that is a pain when you consider that a Win9x OS needs to be reinstalled sometimes. ( Windows 9x has even such a error-dialog that will tell you if eevrythings broken : “Reinstall Windows” )

On modern machines most of the issuse back then are cured as if by magic.
Why ? because OEMs learned a lot over the time.

ME is not 98 third edition. OEMs learned it and customers needed to learn that too.
Forget all your DOS-knowledge. ME is Windows-centric. A modern OS all around Multimedia. Introduced all the features you love in XP Home. Windows 98SE was business and home. ME is Home Alone.

So in short. NOW I love it. Its a ideal OS for machines where XP will run slowly.

I use it on a Fujitsu-Siemens PIII 866, 256 MB Ram every day and use the latest Opera for browsing, I have a new digital camera,external DVD burner, a HP all in one Printer/Scanner, Wireless LAN and a bluetooth headset attached to it and ME supports all that.

Crashes occur extremely rare, and if they do its just a reboot of about 20 seconds time and I am back in.

If you have trouble with ME :

go over to http://WWW.MDGX.com outstanding (!) page and navigate to the WinME section.

He has every single Microsoft Hotfix for ME available ( there are many ) to cure some of the pain if you happen to have one. make a syste,-restore point before ( don’t forget the hotfix for Systemrestores date/time bug ). Install only those that are especially for your specific problem and see if it is gone. If PC behaves unstable use System-Restore to go back.

Also an early attempt has been made to put these fixes into a convenient ServicePack like the one for 98SE. Yo can find that too there. But it needs more teting on more machines. SPs can have side-effects, we all know.