Timeline for What made Windows Me so crash-prone?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
29 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 17, 2019 at 14:49 | comment | added | Tonny | @JustinTime Back in the day most people with internet where on dailup and most modems where so-called WinModems (PCI cards). These worked fine on 95/98 (VxD based), but the VxD/WDM changes in Me seriously caused issues for these. WinPrinters same thing. I've dealt with at least 400 Me computers (rolling out work PC's back in the day) and our standard was: If there is a WinModem or WinPrinter involved go back to 98SE. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 15:28 | comment | added | SztupY | WinME was the first Windows that natively supported USB flash disks without extra drivers (I remember how much of a pain that was under Windows 98 to get some flash disks running properly), but this was effectively the only good point for me in ME | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 12:30 | comment | added | KRyan | Thank you for this; my family had ME growing up (we had a pre-Jobs-return Mac prior to that, but it was our first PC), and I never remembered anything particularly wrong with it, which made all the vitriol over ME rather confusing to me. Since we didn’t have 98 to upgrade from or 2000 Pro to compare with, the lack of new features was a non-issue for us. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 12:06 | comment | added | Raffzahn | @Luaan No doubt, there was much variation in Europe. And that's the point compared to the US, where IE basically ruled from the late 90s into the early naughties. Over here it's been as well less about the organization (ours was meant to be 100% MS) but customers and they where much more diverse. IE reached more than 90% share. ~2001 IE at it's peak was over 90% in the US, but 'only' 60% in Europe and about 40% in Germany not its the smallest market. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 7:59 | comment | added | Luaan | @Raffzahn I don't think it's quite as clear cut US vs. Europe, coming from Europe. I think it was mostly a random choice since about IE 4.0, with each browser having its own pros and kinks. And of course, then Netscape did that stupid thing with starting from scratch, and lost pretty much everything until they finally managed to release Mozilla, for free, something like four years later (an eternity in internet time). The main thing is IMO a sort of networking effect - if your enterprise already used Netscape for something, they'd want everything in Netscape and vice versa. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 7:11 | comment | added | Raffzahn | @ZacFaragher I guess that depends a lot on the region you'd live. While IE was a considerable main player in the US, it was always just a second in Europe. At that time I worked at a fairly large company with high level MS contracts - still, development was done (and required) to fit Netscape first. We couldn't dare to make a product just working with IE. It would have just flopped. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 6:43 | comment | added | Zac Faragher | @Greenonline thanks for the explanation, but I'm not so young as to never have heard the expression before. Like it or not, IE became the default standard for enterprise compatibility - if you had a third party website you needed to use, it would only be guaranteed to work in IE - and if it worked in other browsers, well that was just dandy. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 6:38 | comment | added | Greenonline | @ZacFaragher back in the day, that is how IE was referred to in industry, at least in US and UK software infrastructure companies. The product was next to useless. | |
| Jul 16, 2019 at 0:03 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 21:18 | comment | added | Justin Time - Reinstate Monica | It might be worth noting that the VxD and WDM driver models had a tendency to conflict with each other, instead of helping WDM to supplant VxD while retaining significant backwards compatibility (as intended). This tended to cause stability issues on systems requiring a mixture of both types of drivers. I'm not entirely sure of the details, or what went wrong, though; the phasing-out process started with 98, which mixed VxD and WDM without nearly as many issues. Perhaps it stemmed from ME being more reliant on WDM than 98 was, I don't have enough info for a full-fledged answer. | |
| S Jul 15, 2019 at 13:04 | history | suggested | CommunityBot | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Fix spelling
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 12:34 | comment | added | rexkogitans | The abbreviation ME was said to mean "Mistake Edition". | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 11:58 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jul 15, 2019 at 13:04 | |||||
| S Jul 15, 2019 at 6:29 | history | suggested | Zac Faragher | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Fixing typos
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| Jul 15, 2019 at 5:59 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | I can't forget a website I saw nearly twenty years ago: "Worst viewed with Microsloth Inter-nut Exploder." | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 5:07 | comment | added | Julie in Austin | I used both Win2K and WinME at my house at the same time. I'd also used everything from DOS 1.1 up through Win98SE by that time. I think the real reason "WinME crashed all the time!" was the Internet was finally reaching far enough into people's lives that people had dumped their older Windows machines. | |
| Jul 15, 2019 at 2:44 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jul 15, 2019 at 6:29 | |||||
| Jul 15, 2019 at 0:17 | comment | added | Raffzahn | Not just 13 year old - it's been the standard term at work - heck, one (uninitiated) users even belived it to be the real name and used it in a customer handout :)) And it was all true, as IE caused endless problems with our (late 90s) web applications. | |
| Jul 14, 2019 at 23:21 | comment | added | Criticizing Israel not allowed | "Internet Exploder" is a pun 13-year-olds used in the early 2000's. | |
| Jul 14, 2019 at 22:46 | vote | accept | aybe | ||
| Jul 14, 2019 at 22:45 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 22:19 | comment | added | Bruce Abbott | "Internet Exploder' - LOL! | |
| Jul 14, 2019 at 17:31 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 17:28 | comment | added | Raffzahn | @RichF Oh, no doubt, ME offered a lot of problems with existing DOS games (I guess I should add this (though already covered with DOS incompatibility) as it is as well a negative point right at their target market). The new functions where regarding networking and sound support for Windows games, DOS games did not get any inovation. | |
| Jul 14, 2019 at 17:20 | comment | added | RichF | Raffzahn, I remember game support in Windows ME as being very bad for numerous pre-existing DOS games. As I remember, it seemed like DOS wasn't acting like DOS. So does the game support you mention mean new features to support future games? Sometimes even installation of older games would be thwarted by W.ME. | |
| Jul 14, 2019 at 17:05 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 16:36 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 16:24 | history | edited | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Jul 14, 2019 at 15:54 | history | answered | Raffzahn | CC BY-SA 4.0 |