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Comment by erichurkman | Hacker News Reader

Windows XP even before SP2 was a _delight_ compared to the true train wreck that shipped on consumer PCs before it: Windows "Mistake Edition" Me.

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Windows Me was a strange beast. On some (most?) PCs it was an absolute disaster up to corrupting hard disks, on others it was a solid step up from win98. But you could never say beforehand how it was going to behave, even on 2 identical PCs. I never understood what triggered its abysmall behaviour.

Oh well, who cares now, it lies in its well deserved grave, I guess.

I have similar recollection of ME, on my personal 333MHz Celeron with 128mb of RAM laptop it ran fantastically, never had issues and was stable and while 2000/XP were also stable, ME was fast compared to 2000/XP on the same hardware.

Other people I know couldn't get past a VxD error on the first install, others couldn't get faster K6 or PIII's to be stable with it.

It was a love it or hate it thing--my opinion of Vista and 8.0 are similar.

It was also preferred (by most people, at least) to Windows Vista, the product that usually shipped on PCs after it.

It was an almost undeniable local maximum in Windows releases from the consumer side, which does make some of the fond memories make sense.

What's weird is that I had a laptop that Vista actually ran well on, and I didn't have any real problems. Of course it was a higher-end laptop (similar specs and price to what Apple sold at the time).

It often feels like the biggest difference between Vista and 7 was actually time. As such, the cheap computers 7 shipped on were much better than the cheap underpowered computers Vista shipped on (despite both OSes likely having similar realistic requirements).

Win7 kinda was the SP2 of Vista more than a major version.

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