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In defense of Windows Me, no seriously
Windows Me gets a bad rap. Well, to be fair, it's largely deserved. The short-lived operating system crashed like there was no tomorrow. But it was also Microsoft's first consumer-oriented operating to include many features we take for granted today. Long Zheng wrote an interesting article this week listing reasons why Windows Me deserves more respect than it gets, and we were rather surprised to find that we agree with many of his points.For example, Windows Me was the first OS to include Winows Movie Maker, System Restore, Universal Plug and Play, automatic updates, image previews in Windows Explorer, and a generic USB mass storage driver.
The problem is that Microsoft added all of these features to the Windows 98 kernel, which wasn't the most reliable basis for an operating system. It's hard not to think of Windows Me as a highly unstable operating system with a lot of shiny bells and whistles that you didn't think you needed at the time.
Sound familiar? These days a lot of folks like to complain that Windows Vista adds a lot of eye candy, but ultimately doesn't perform as well as Windows XP. But Windows Vista also features an enhanced start menu, search features, live previews of running applications, a better network manager, and a ton of security enhancements (even if some of them are a bit heavy-handed). So maybe Windows Vista is the next Windows Me, but is that necessarily a bad thing?
Comments
22
Subscribe to commentswhiskeyMar 21st 2008 12:01AM
For me the main Vista issue is that, if i put all the bells and whistles to XP using third party products... It outperforms Vista.
Same thing could be said about ME (you know, if you install one of those Win98 that come with all third party stuff preinstalled) was outrun by said Win98...
My biggest regret with this Vista product is that this time is even more troublesome than ME... They promised lots of stuff and ended up not delivering it all, plus most of the thing that were working correctly now they didn't (Calculating time needed to transfer files took longer than transferring said files?). Now I'm not inclined to get SP1... Why? Because they fooled me more than twice in the past, so shame on me!
I happily paid for their office software, i happily bought another XP (it just works, though it still is a system hog, it hogs less than Vista) but now my new machines will be either Macs or PC's running Linux.
Thank you, come again!
james 42Mar 21st 2008 12:01PM
ME was great! It caused a lot of perfectly good computers to be returned and refurbished. I bought a refurb for cheap and installed win2k. Still works today!