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Comment by piokoch | Hacker News Reader

Who on earth would like to install that?

I can understand installing Win 95, sentiments, blah, blah, first "real" windows MS system (Win 3.X was still some kind of windows manager on top of DOS).

But 98?

Maybe let's go hardcore and go with Win 98ME, the worst operating system ever (with Vista as a strong second-place contender), at least we can experience random blue screens, which were the major feature introduced by 98ME, and that surely should be replicated by a simulator, to feel those old vibes.

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Apparently a fringe opinion, but Win98SE was IMO the best iteration of Win95.

For me it was faster, more stable, more polished than Win95.

(a bit more bloated with the IE-integration, but that was easy to strip away)

Your memory seems to fail you. Win98SE was the most stable of the 9x series. ME was the bad one.

Your reading seems to fail you. That's what they said :-)

> Win 98ME

Windows ME was not a release of, nor branded with, Windows 98 whatsoever.

Right. And a fun fact for readers, it's technically Windows "Me" (title case) and advertising has it read as "me" as in me the person, not "M.E." as Millenium Edition.

Kind of interesting history there - "Me" was intended to show the PC was becoming more personal. I think WinMe added some new "My Documents", "My Pictures", etc. that came with Win2k and later XP which helped drive the personal aspect. Then later "XP" was meant to be "eXPerience" as in a new PC experience. Microsoft was a bit more fun back then.

Part of the thinking behind the "My *" naming for those directories was forcing applications to handle spaces in paths properly.

That was definitely part of it... as XP SPs released, they locked down application access to read/write where applications typically shouldn't, including in their own Program Files directory, and this did bork some applications even though it was supposed to redirect the changes to a different directory.

So many poorly written applications broke through those days. I may be thinking of Vista/Win7 though, the time has muddled my brain a bit.

No, but in practice it was Win98SE3. Also, it was obsolete before it was even released. There was basically no reason to run WinME instead of WinXP, especially on a new machine.

> Also, it was obsolete before it was even released.

How so? Windows NT and 2000 were not designed for home use, and Windows ME released (September 14, 2000)[0] over a year before Windows XP released (October 25, 2001)[1].

[0] https://news.microsoft.com/2000/09/14/microsoft-announces-im...

[1] https://news.microsoft.com/2001/08/24/an-Inside-look-at-the-...

Win98SE was the final usable Win9x version and the most stable version of them all.

There's a crapload of late 90s / early 00s Windows games that isnt compatible with modern Windows, so running or emulating Win9X is really the only way of accessing them.

If you are doing Win9X today, you would only be using Win98SE or you're doing it wrong.

And let's not mention Windows Millenium again.

One of the big changes with ME was cutting out DOS mode as much as they could, and if you're doing a system for retro computing then it's hard to see why you'd constrain what it's capable of. If you don't need that and you've blacklisted 95/98 then I don't see why you wouldn't go for win2k onwards as it'll be a lot easier to work with, but it's a different animal.

Yes, agree on Window Me. It's not a lot of use for a retro gaming system by default. It's not too difficult to rollback some of the changes and re-enable the ability to exit to MS-DOS 7, but it is extra steps for not much gain.

IMO, the main reason to run Windows Me over Windows 98 SE is if one likes the Windows 2000-style shell updates that were bundled into Me. Me also has a more mature network stack and some other updates ported over from the 2K kernel. If one likes those features then by all means - re-enable DOS mode and it's a decent alternative to 98 SE.

I just wanted to add that Windows 3.X is capable of running independently of DOS and BIOS calls. By default yes, it uses the BIOS for disk access. But with a disk driver (e.g. Microhouse driver, FastDisk driver), Windows 3.X can live entirely in 32-bit protected mode. Windows 95/98/Me are the same way, they are real 16/32-bit hybrid kernels that used DOS as a bootstrap but nothing more.

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