Hacker News Reader

Comment by unsui | Hacker News Reader

This is definitely one of those little trivia factoids that is surprising to me:

Apparently, WinME actually introduced at least one evolutionary improvement that stuck around, and wasn't a complete dead-end.

View on HN

Even the worst versions of windows has engineers working on low level iterative improvements, far detached from the product level people who are fucking up the big picture.

I have fond memories of Windows ME. My family upgraded from 95 to ME, skipped 98

It had others like System Restore.

If you were going to install Windows ME, you might as well have installed Windows 2000.

Long time ago but I think, as a normal Windows 95 or Windows 98-using consumer, upgrading to Windows ME was almost certainly easier and less disruptive. In spite of the criticism it got at the time, Windows ME worked fine for most people.

I had some involvement with Windows 2000 from a professional product perspective--was even at the launch event--but don't think I ever seriously ran it as a desktop OS.

Fresh installs were the norm in my household. We never bothered with in-place upgrades between major versions of 95/98/98SE avoid cruft.

Windows 2000 was absolutely the OS to have until MS tightened XP with SP2.

Windows ME still had the same loading sequence as Windows 95/98. That is, DOS kernel booted and then loaded the Windows code. Now it is true that Windows 95 and above mostly bypassed DOS once it was loaded, and DOS was used as merely a boot loader. And Windows ME made that more hidden. But you could still extract a DOS version out of ME (open a command window, use "format /s", then copy the various DOS command executables from the one directory to the floppy). You could then use this to boot DOS, and type "win" or something like that to load Windows ME.

While I agree Win2k was in all ways better, it wasn't cheap relative to ME.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com