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With SteamOS coming, Microsoft needs to up its game in the handheld gaming market
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this post was submitted on 21 Aug 2024
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You remember it as Windows 8. But Windows ME haunt me.
Tell us younglings why
There used to be two types of "Windows" in existence. The one based on NT which we use today, and the Win9x line that was basically just an advanced GUI on top of aging MS-DOS. Windows ME was the last of that line, where they tried to pack it full of modern features we've come to expect, but still on top of the unstable DOS core. It was an abomination.
I remember just skipping it and going from Win98SE straight to XP. That was the day 80s-style computing died for me, in 2002.
Yup. We had a 98 "home" PC that my mom, brother, and I used, then my dad had his PC for his graphics/web design work. He went to "upgrade" to ME, swore a bunch, then reverted to 98 until XP came out. I don't think I ever fiddled with ME, but I'm glad I didn't have to from all the horror stories. Granted I was maybe 12ish when all that happened, and I really only played games then (and finding certain images on certain websites once I discovered that was a thing), but I didn't get into computers, tinkering, and Linux until high school when I got my own computer.
It was notoriously buggy and didn't offer any reason to upgrade. Everyone stayed on 95, 98, 98se or migrated to Windows 2000. XP offered a compelling reason to upgrade with improved directx support and the rebase onto 2000 tech.
I beta tested 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, XP and a few other things.
My usage lead to 3-4 blue-screen crashes every single day. Keep in mind a system reboot took up to 10 minutes, and there was no such thing as autosave. Back then Microsoft’s victims were conditioned to think this was quirky and unavoidable. This was on a vertically integrated, pre-built product from Gateway (covered in cow-print but that’s a cultural peculiarity from a different time) so there was no unsupported hardware to blame.
I remember the cowprint logos on computers :) was just a bit too young to use ME but I remember seeing it around. Wild how they charged money for that. I feel like people are still traumatized by this at my work. They’re afraid that if they touch something it will break and crash.
This, but on a SONY VAIO desktop. The switch to Windows 2000 was a godsend for that system.
A lot of that instability was just budget 90s prebuilts being garbage. Gateway was close to eMachines tier as far as stability went. You had to spend 50-100% more money for something like a Micron desktop if you wanted reliability, or just build your own from reliable parts.
I like how we've completely erased Vista from our collective memories at this point.
Thing is, ME as an idea made sense. Win2K wasn't targeted to consumers, XP was in the pipeline for that, but they needed an interim version until it was ready. It looked like Win2K, but ostensibly compatible with the Win9x line. They just fucked up the execution on the internals, so it was terribly unstable.
Windows 8 had the opposite problem: it improved on Win7 internals, so it was solid, but had a terrible UI that no one asked for.
One could argue that the reason ME failed was very possibly because it was rushed. Win8, on the other hand, looks very much like designed by comitee with either very misguided designers or marketing people at the helm. Because of that, Win8 feels like a much worse failure to me.
And ended up tarnishing win2k's good name. Many people think it was the same as ME.
Win2k is the only Windows which didn't irritate me.
I didn't actually mind the UI once I got used to it. If they had just made some things optional UI wise they would have been fine I think. I hated cista because of all the random things they changed for no real reason that I could understand. They fixed a lot of that with 7, but 8 was a jump too far. It made some sort of sense on touch screens, but given that most devices running windows at the time weren't touch screens it was problematic for long time users.
But around the same time they began pushing their hybrid surface devices and those all did have a touch screen so as a hardware decision I can still understand why they tried it.
I also kind of feel like it dumbed down a lot of the power user facing controls that most people coming from previous windows versions (especially XP) used pretty frequently. People talk a lot of trash about younger gens not being tech savvy and I feel like this is part of the reason. They couldn't tell you what control panel was, wouldn't know what to do with those settings if you told them, let alone using the run command to open msconfig, or the command line. They never had to do that because for them computers and phones just work (most of the time).
It's frustrating the number of things I feel like Microsoft could have done to make 8 better that didn't involved the adpocalypse nightmare that they have become with both 10 and especially 11.
Windows 8.1 was actually really good with the new UI that was closer to the other Windows versions, but with 8 underneath. Only issue was the same as with 7, that there were still elements of the previous Option menus, causing a lot of similar options to be in 2 completely different menus which made no sense.
It is my understanding that ME was the last DOS-based Windows. My understanding is you can find "MS-DOS 7.0" ISOs floating around out there which IIRC is the DOS version ME is based on that was never released separately but for some reason it happened in China? Like it was used in Chinese computer factories or something? Half remembering an LGR video or something?