For some home PC users in late 2001, Windows ME was probably better value for money than Windows XP. There, I've said it...
Flick back through a PC magazine from early autumn 2001, and you’ll see something which, today, looks quite bizarre. You’ll find new PCs being advertised by retailers with this proud boast headlining the software spec…
“Operating system: Windows 98SE”
Latter 2001? Windows 98? Doesn’t sound right, does it?…
Although Windows XP did not fully launch until late October 2001, it’s still quite a doubletake seeing 98SE presented as the cutting edge of consumer PC operation in the immediate run up to that. And it was plain to see in certain magazines that most of the home-user-targeted turtorials were still being run in Windows 98SE too. Indeed, a new PC I bought on 26 March 2001 came with Windows 98SE pre-installed.
If you weren’t around back then, Windows 98SE was the Second Edition of Windows 98 – released as an emergency measure in 1999. Its release was necessary because the original Windows 98 had been a horrific mine of crashes, blue error screens and, sometimes, partial boot failures that most home users could only resolve by reinstalling Windows. Windows 98SE was much more stable than the original Windows 98, but it wasn’t perfect by any means.
So why were OEMs still championing 98SE in summer 2001, long after the release of its successor, Windows Millennium Edition? What had happened to Windows ME? Looking at some magazines from 2001 you’d be forgiven for thinking it was just a hoax that never really happened. Was Windows ME really so bad that even the people whose responsibility it was to stay right on the crest of the technological wave, decided to airbrush it out of the picture?
According to some of the most influential reviewers, yes, it was that bad. Worst operating system ever, some have said. But I’m going to offer a vehement contradiction to the high and mighty slatings of Windows ME, and assert that it was easily the best operating system Microsoft released without NTFS compatibility.
Firstly, I know this is rude, but it’s nevertheless a fact and I need to get it out of my system… Anyone who used both Windows 98 (First Edition) and Windows ME, and somehow managed to conclude that Windows ME was worse than 1998’s eternal conveyor belt of bugs, crashes, hangs, more hangs, more crashes and catastrophic boot meltdowns, is certifiably a couple of cheese rolls short of the full picnic basket.
A little more seriously, a lot of the people slamming Windows ME in its day were out of touch with the typical home consumer at whom it was aimed. The influential writers back then were almost invariably tech obsessives who worshipped Windows 2000 Professional, talked about IRQ conflicts and the minutiae of 802.11b in the pub, and quoted product prices without the VAT. The fact alone that computer magazines quoted prices exclusive of VAT showed their contempt for the typical consumer.
They were in a different world from people in your average private residence, who just wanted to switch on a computer and have it make everything as simple and non-technical as possible for them.
And that’s exactly what Windows ME did. It made everything easier, more reliable, more foolproof. A lot less could go wrong in Windows ME than in Windows 98SE, Windows 98 or Windows 95.
Prior to ME, there had been two distinct disciplines of Windows system. The early ‘90s Windows 3.x series had actually been very stable, but not at all intuitive. Then the Windows 9x series had come along with spectacular intuitive properties, but poor (and in the case of 98 First Edition, dire) stability. Windows ME was the first home consumer operating system for the PC to fuse the intuitive user interface of Windows 9x with the stability and confidence-inspiring feel of Windows 3.x.
THE MAJOR FAVOURABLES OF WINDOWS ME
The first singular positive factor about Windows ME was the price. Those upgrading from Windows 98 could get it for less than forty quid, and that was way under half what the upgrades to Windows XP would subsequently cost. The full Windows ME product, for purchasers with no existing Windows installation, cost £137. An upgrade from Windows 95 to ME cost £70. Still significantly less than the upgrade from ME to XP – whose introductions were only a year apart.
WINDOWS ME vs WINDOWS XP
Windows XP was a much more expensive operating system than ME, and as someone who worked for a retailer who stocked XP when it was launched, I can confirm that it did not immediately fly off the shelves. At £176 for XP Home and £255 for XP Pro (£85 and £188 respectively for the upgrade versions) that was no great surprise.
To the average home user, the only immediately obvious advantage that the original version of XP Home had over ME was its account management, which let families compartmentalise each member’s personal computer space, with permission control, and instantly switch spaces, so that one PC could serve everyone. As long as they didn’t all want to use it at the same time, obviously.
Other than that, especially when the original XP was set to the Windows Classic visual theme (which looked like ME in default mode), most home consumers would probably not notice a great deal of difference between XP and ME in late 2001.
Sure, security on the NTFS-anchored Windows XP was vastly better than that on a FAT-anchored setup like ME. But most home consumers didn’t really get how the NTFS permissions system gave them extra protection. They were always told “Security!”, but the retailers were not explaining how or why NTFS was more secure. Indeed many upgraders to Windows XP, initially, ran it on an unconverted FAT32 drive, and so didn’t get the NT security benefits at all.
Remember also that it took a while for Windows XP to gain a compatibility advantage over ME and the 9x series. When XP launched, existing home user installations routinely supported Windows ME, but not necessarily XP. So Windows XP had a compatibility handicap to begin with. That’s never attractive.
XP's handicap fairly quickly turned to an advantage as software vendors – not least Microsoft themselves – focused solely on NTFS products and dropped support for 95/98/ME. Especially post Service Pack 1, XP's compatibility advantage really began to boom, since the .NET Framework had not been part of the original XP release. After Service Pack 1 added .NET, a wide range of programs gained native support. Subsequent .NET updates (plus dependents like Visual Basic .NET and the programs it created) did not support the Windows 4 series.
But in 2001, a very large number of home users would see no major urgency to upgrade from Windows ME to Windows XP. At that time it was nothing like as big an upgrade as it seems today.
XP circa 2001 predated any updates, bug fixes or service packs, and the difference between XP circa 2001, and XP circa 2008 (post the final service pack), is monumental. Windows ME didn’t receive those years of progressive refinement, and thus it should always be compared with the original Windows XP – not the version we think of today.
WINDOWS ME vs WINDOWS 98
So that’s a little about the early comparison between ME and XP, but what about the comparison between ME and its predecessors? How did ME improve on 98SE?
The first really important way in which Windows ME subordinated 98SE and all else before it, was its integration of Universal Plug and Play. On an old Pentium II I would install ME over and above 98SE because of that feature alone.
If you had something like an external hard drive, you’d need to install a driver in order to use it with Windows 98, and that to an extent defeated the object of the portable drive. Drive portability was supposed to be about convenience. But if you had to install a driver everywhere you took your portable drive, you’d be facing some impractical situations and potentially a lot of wasted time. Also, some people understandably would not want someone else’s driver software installed on their PCs.
That hassle ended when Windows ME arrived. With Universal Plug and Play, simply plugging a drive into the USB port would make the external disk recognisable to the system, with no need for any driver installation. And today, it’s even more critical to have that feature for a Pentium II. Pentium IIs can’t meaningfully get around the web anymore (certainly not as regards script-dependent sites), so often the most convenient way to get a download onto those old PCs is via an external hard drive transfer. As long as your external drive is formatted FAT-compatible it still works perfectly.
Next, there was Windows ME’s huge increase not only in system stability, but in system intelligence. It had features like SFP (System File Protection), which real-time monitored the integrity of all system files, and instantly re-established their integrity if it was ever compromised.
This had been a key problem with Windows 95 and Windows 98, which would so frequently see system files overwritten with incompatible versions when hardware or software was installed. It was a major cause of crashes, blue error screens and general buggy behaviour. Win ME’s solution was one of the reasons its users saw far fewer of those untimely interruptions and crashes. The tale that Windows ME crashed all the time was just not true. It was very comfortably more surefooted than 98SE.
ME’s System Restore gave it another dramatic advantage over Windows 98. It’s one of those things you don’t see much point in having if you understand the computer inside out. But if you’re not very tech-minded, the ability to roll back the state of the PC to a time before something went wrong is not just a rescue button – it’s a confidence builder…
“I CAN install more things and try them out. If anything causes a problem I’ll just roll it back.”
Perhaps one of the most instantly visible improvements that struck upgraders from Windows 98 to Windows ME, was ME’s default option to display images as thumbnails when browsing folders. This had been available in Windows 98, but users needed to pre-enable it per folder by right clicking the folder icon and changing a setting in Properties. A lot of users didn’t realise the feature was available, and some third parties did well out of that ignorance, successfully marketing image management routines which only really did what Win 98 itself could do, but had for some reason hidden away.
One of Windows ME’s main promotional themes was its improved image management, so the hidden thumbnail feature was evidently something a lot of 98 users had remained unaware of, even as late as summer 2000.
ME’s inclusion of the new Windows Movie Maker was widely welcomed too.
And there were lots of small but incredibly useful and timesaving additions, like "Open With…" in the context menus - allowing the user to individually choose a program for opening a given file, rather than having to globally reset its association.
Much of what ME was about went over the heads of the real techies, because techies could mod Windows 98 to perform more like Windows ME, and they didn’t rely on help centres or wizards the way so many home users did. But for those who did need the computer to hold their hand a little, Windows ME was markedly better than Windows 98.
WHY WAS WINDOWS ME SO HEAVILY CRITICISED?
Although ME was categorically a better operating system than any home consumer-targeted Windows OS that had gone before it, there were some circumstances surrounding it that did detract from its glory.
Anyone with old non-Windows games was going to have a much greater challenge running them, because Windows ME dispensed with Real Mode MS-DOS entirely and there was no simple workaround.
But perhaps a greater dampener at the launch of ME was merely the perception of a severe slowdown in progress.
Between mid 1995 when Windows 3.11 was still the current product, and mid 1999 when Windows 98SE finally stabilised Windows 98, there had been a phenomenal level of advancement in the Windows user experience. So expectations among consumers were now very high when it came to new releases. Both Windows 95 and Windows 98 had carried an “OMG!” factor, as compared with the previous Windows version.
Anyone expecting another “OMG!” moment with Windows ME was going to be disappointed. Apart from the inclusion of Windows Movie Maker, and the activation of image thumbnails for people who hadn’t discovered the feature in 98, Windows ME’s improvements were largely “behind the scenes”. And the most quickly-discovered change of all – Personalised Menus (which hid various items you’d put in the Start Menu) – was something I just found intensely annoying. Switched it off on day one if I remember rightly.
So it’s easy to see how people were underwhelmed. But being underwhelmed by progress, and concluding that Windows ME was the worst operating system ever, are two very different things.
The critics who attacked Windows ME were wrong. And if they were professionals, they should have known better. Their reputations were saved by the rapid arrival of Windows XP. Because the only reason people today still cite those scathing criticisms as valid is that they never got the chance to actually use Windows ME.
Had XP not come along until 2003, a lot more real users would have naturally migrated from 98 to ME, and would, as I did, have appreciated the ways in which ME was incontrovertibly better. It’s also inevitable that had ME lasted longer it would have received updates that made it even better. It was the only one of the Windows 4 incarnations that did not receive any official service packs or revised editions. It didn’t need them, and that should be considered another point in its favour.
Windows ME was obviously not the best operating system Microsoft ever made. But it was certainly nowhere near the worst.