Ask HN: Why was Windows ME so bad? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why was Windows ME so bad?

10 pointsalganet12 comments

Just a little bit of nostalgia!

I remember the constant kernel crashes and the fact that it was a poorly rebranded Windows 98, but does anyone remember other reasons why ME was so innefective?

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Windows ME was bad, but not due to anything specific they did with ME. Between Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, and then ME the hardware landscape absolutely exploded (e.g. tens of new categories of devices). Which meant more third party drivers than ever before. Drivers ran in the same address space as the kernel, without isolation, and BY DESIGN would monkey-patch the kernel (with different drivers sometimes stepping on one another). This was already a problem in 98/98 SE, but the whole thing just crumbled under its own weight around the time of ME.

2000/XP by contrast had strict user mode/kernel mode isolation, processes had their own virtual memory, and kernel address space was protected (making monkey-patching more difficult). In XP in particular they also started to adopt Driver Signature Enforcement, which at that time brought a cultural rather than technical shift (i.e. everyone knew it would eventually be mandatory, and so started to tighten processes).

Vista then made things even better with Mandatory Driver Signing (64-bit), PatchGuard + ASLR (i.e. no more monkey-patching the kernel), Code Integrity Checks (corruption detection), WDDM for more stable graphics drivers, and shifted some other drivers to user mode (soft failures instead of BSODs).

The official sales pitch of ME over 98 SE was: System Restore (new), System File Protection (technically ported from 2K, but new for the 9x line), faster boot (due to real-mode DOS being removed), Automatic Updates, Movie Maker, and improved home networking. It was a big upgrade for people coming from 98 and still a minor upgrade from 98 SE (which a lot of people skipped, even though it was a substantial improvement for just $20 upgrade cost).

PS - Vista moving to WDDM for graphics drivers, which everyone takes for granted today, is much of the reason why it was SO poorly received upon released. Vendors moved both to WDDM and in some cases to x64 for the first time, and it was a buggy mess there for at least a year -- which was blamed on Vista.

I just remembered Windows CEMeNT: "as hard as a rock and as dumb as a brick".

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2utm7b/win...

I think it was a combination of all a lot of new tech was being dumped on the tail end of Windows 95/98 combined a bit of sloppyness in how it was deployed. Didn't help seeing how well Win 2K could handle this stuff with its NT kernel despite coming out before ME.

Windows 98 Special Edition had a lot of new tech and it was cool and stable. I wonder which stuff you are thinking when you say this. Which tech do you have in mind?

This is more a general statement, keep in mind it has been almost 25 years since I used ME.

More it was at the mercy of the software industry of the time. Development of complex utilities from video editing to web browsers being more than just HTML viewers and fighting over limited memory trying to manage a high stack of rapidly more complex drivers and ME just didn't handle it that greatly. The modem, printer, high end GPU's and audio systems all fighting to work together.

It just seems like the whole Windows system pre-NT was struggling to stay together. Cue the famous Win 98 demonstration crashing the system via a Plug and play scanner. Win 98 SE was in a bizarre stable state, ME wasn't and the differences under the hood could have been something that appeared fairly minor.

Maybe there is some ME (Mandela Effect) in the perception of what Windows ME was (pun intended).

I used it (Windows ME, not Mandela Effects), but I wasn't knowledgeable enough to understand what caused the kernel crashes and instabilities. I couldn't say if it was some driver or something. Maybe it was Winamp, I honestly woudn't know.

Anyway, if there's any hope for a verifiable technical reason on more solid grounds than general statements, this would be the place to find it, don't you think? There are so many articles that go into rabbit-hole level detail about all sorts of things here.

Windows 98 Second Edition, not Special Edition. The name is a hint of why it was more stable. They fixed a lot of issues in that release. Windows Me never got a chance for a second edition to improve its issues.

It wasn't bad when you had hardware which had drivers made for ME, or the hardware was supported sufficiently by ME itself. And only used software which didn't rely on kludges which didn't work under ME(anymore).

Which wasn't the reality for most users of the patchworked systems common and available at the time.

In my experience, it wasn’t bad.

It was just fine.

I ran AutoCad Architectural Desktop on a Toshiba Satellite under it…

But my guess is that most people ran worse software, had less experience with computers, had lots of shovelware sludge running in the background…and less ram.

For me - many games runs on DOS.

So in 98SE i can choose to boot in DOS and then type Win to run Windows or run some DOS game.

Also there was specific software that runs only on DOS like SoftICE.

I seem to remember that it was System Restore that slowed it to a crawl

https://xkcd.com/323/

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