Windows ME was an absolute joke and the cd was very quickly turned into a coaster where I lived at the time. A real 2 bit botch job of a quasi 32 bit operating system built on unstable 16 bit underpinnings. MS who really shouldn't have bothered knowing full well that an NT-based consumer product was on the horizon...Win 98 SE could have been kept going a little longer.
I'm not sure why Me ended up being quite so bad. To some extent it was Win98 3rd edition so should have been much the same as 98SE.
Worth noting that extended support for Win 98 (all versions iirc, not just SE) ended on 11th July 2006, the same day as ME's extended support came to a end, though MS had originally planned to cease ME extended support at the end of 2004.
That was what the Neptune project was originally intended to be at it's core, before it was merged with the Odyssey project (intended to be the successor to 2000 for business customers) for the combined teams to work on a new project codenamed Whistler, which eventually became XP.
Or we're buying used. I've got a couple of older used ex-business desktops which cost next to nothing, the most recent one came with an i7 CPU plus a RAM and SSD upgrade, it runs modern Linux (Kubuntu 24.04 at present) perfectly and cost so little it's virtually a throwaway purchase (it cost me less than my day out at the GCR Diesel gala on Saturday!).
Some article I read years and years ago said (after Brian's quote): The result was the 6-second Windows 95 startup sound...
As I understand it ME's main issues was that it was enough like 98 that drivers meant for 98 would work, sort of, so that's what some manufacturers did. Those drivers would then cause the system to become unstable. Use drivers designed for ME and no issues.
If memory serves me correctly ME-specific drivers were really hard to come by around the time of ME's release precisely because the 'our Win9x drivers should be fine' attitude was prevalent amongst vendors. Pick any of poor pre-release enablement of partners by Microsoft, vendor laziness or intransigence or a mix thereof. Whatever the cause the ME experience around release was pretty miserable.
I suspect not many remember it as it wasn't sold to retail customers.
We used windows 2000 for the machines we used for our IT course at college, these were machines that were found for us to use and weren't that special so W2K was perfect. They ended up also running VMware workstation with W2K advanced server and another instance of W2K. All that and no more than 512Mb RAM!
I think, if one were to rank NT-based Windows OSes in terms of reliability, usability & stability, 2000, XP and 7 (especially after the service packs for the latter pair) would be at the top of the pile. Of the post-3.1 MS-DOS/9x-based systems, prolly 95 and/or 98 though that architecture is intrinstically less stable than NT so it's a bit more of a grey area.
Windows 2000 was the successor to 1996’s NT4.0, as noted previously in this thread Me was a stopgap for the consumer market.
Just to be a little clearer for @frankmoh, NT4.0 and 2000 were professional operating systems (NT-based), whereas 95, 98 and Me were consumer operating systems / OSs (still DOS-based). (Although some PC enthusiasts did use 2000 for consumer use - it had much better DirectX / gaming support than NT4.0 for a pre-XP NT-based/professional OS, while having the stability and other advantages over the consumer DOS-based 98/Me).
