WinME , your horror stories please ...

[xIcculusx]

well i have few people i know on another forum that valiantly hold to the idead winME is way better then win95/win98se

they say that tis more stable , and out of many many comps they installed iton they have no problems , i dont doubt them , but they asked me to back up my claims that winME has alot of issues , i install for road runner (cable modem service) and i run into winME issues on a daily basis , and i find that its more the minority that doesnt have problems and the majority experiences slow downs program incompatibility etc etc

so whats your thoughts?

if you installed it and didnt have a prob , great !! but have you dont anything besides web surfing?

if you have and had probs , bummer...

but what issues did you have?

even a brief reply will be welcome , thnx a bunch !

ps links to winME incompatibility/instability issues are welcome

yea im lazy cause im just linking this thread to that forum so they can see what happens , whether it backs me up or shoots me down remains to be seen...

 

[xIcculusx]

guess i might wanna leave a link to the forum if you wanna see their replies

http://www.ritualistic.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/008996.html

 

[crazychicken]

Horror story #1:
Every thing works perfectly
system has been up for 1.6 years. Has yet to do anything worse than regular hex dumps from poorly written programs.

Everyone is like "it sucks it sucks"
NO
WRONG

 

[Yzzim]

I've actually had very good luck with WinME, but have heard a bunch of other horror stories. But back when Win98 came out I remember people saying that Win95b was the most stable OS put out by Microsoft (other than NT).

I switched to Win2k just because it handles 256mb of memory better than WinME

 

[SoyBoy004]

BSD everytime i shutdown

 

[Elledan]

Celeron 400, 64 MB RAM PC > constantly a BSOD when playing games (TFC, UT) and it ran out of memory even after you rebooted the system. I've seen the annoying "Windows has ran out of resources blablabla..." box pop up more times than I would wish.

I was forced to go back to Win98 SE. Don't like it either, so Win2k will soon infect that PC too

 

[Aaron1982]

download the ide harddrive shutdown patch, thats what windows update is for. no more bsod at shutdown.

 

[Jim]

Aaron there are thousands out there that wish your statement were true. It's much more complicated than that.

 

[madthumbs]

I think WinMe is only unstable for cheaper hardware especially motherboards. To me, it's no improvement on Win98 aside from some HD space robbing programs like the System Restore feature. If you have the common shutdown problem you may want to close programs before shutting down. The freeware "enditall" program is excellent for this.

 

[cirrus1]

<< madthumbs: I think WinMe is only unstable for cheaper hardware especially motherboards. >>



Well in my IMHO I don't agree with all of this. There are a lot of people out there with State of the art equip. and a lot of them are also subject to stability/perfomance problems. But yes it's right that cheaper hardware and especially M/B's often leads to unstable systems. But I don't think it is the &quot;only&quot; reason.

I agree with what you else say

 

[AndyHui]

I wanted to make a system restore point just before I installed NIC drivers. I made the restore point, and everything seemed OK. Installed the NIC drivers and hosed the system. Wanted to use system restore, but it told me there were no restore points available, even though I had expressly made one.

Had to reformat.

Do people get a double dialoge when they want to shift-delete something? It deletes, and then tells me I can't delete the file because it's not there.

 

[PliotronX]

Actually this article in PCWorld said it best; experiences with WinME are extremes. Either they're really good, or they're really bad. I had good luck, however when I first installed it, it messed up my MBR, and it's prevented the drive from using LBA clusters. Other than that, rock stable, nice new face, and that oh-so-wonderful optimized TCP stack.

 

[Basilisk]

I upgraded from SE to ME in desperation: 'hoped it would fix a corrupted-driver/-registry problem that prevented both Outlook and OExpress from working. No luck: 'had to wipe the disk and re-build from scratch. Reverted to SE.

On a P2-200, ME was a catatonic snail: task start-ups seemed to take longer... much longer... often much much much longer. For the first time, I couldn't stand to work on that machine, which was mainly used for word-processing (a friend was doing her doctorate).

With ME, the interface was so changed, the usual M$ tasks were even more irritating: Where did they move this function? How do I get around that change? Why have they done this?

ME's &quot;little surprises&quot; were endless: I couldn't power-down!! Never could find an option that would simply have the ATX box power-off -- it would always reboot!


'Never found a single benefit in using ME. Not a thing seemed better or less buggy. I'm happier with SE. YMMV.

 

[Ausm]

I have had some customers with no problems and others having difficulty with the machine shutting down properly.

My Suggestion is stick with Win98 SE or better yet go with Win2K best OS Microshaft has released to date IMHO

Ausm

 

[IamDavid]

I had so many BSOD the first day i installed it I got rid of it... Some people have a goo time with it, others don't...

 

[SiliconVandal]

The Mobo/Cheap Equipment theory is totally wrong in IMHO. My T-Bird at home was unusable with ME and too many problems to list. My main horror story is when my boss installed ME on my work comp (Had 2k and worked great) and managed to get it ins
talled with a NTFS Partition. OMG, could I say messed up? Phew..endless problems, even after reformatting! (?). Finally got it working again, even though &quot;I messed it up&quot;, while I was at school..uhh ya. If ME works for you, thats great..but that fact is it sucks for most people. I have a P166 with ultra-cheap components I let my lil' bro use at home and I put ME on it, no problems at all and rock stable and fast.

 

[Regalk]

Installed WinME on5 different machines (Via133A (2), KT133, BX and SS7) and the only horror story is some older programs were not compatible or did not run well otherwise ITs jolly good.

 

[DaaZ]

Ok...

Taught I'd share my WinME experience as well...

Let's go at it in a matter of weeks...

Week 1:

Wow! This kicks ass... Boot-time is like 30 seconds and everything works just damn fine!

Week 2:

Install some mor programs. WinME is now a little slower to start... Well it's just normal. No real issue to date.

Week 3:

I recently had my cable modem so I'm in the processing of downloading about everything that I can get my virtual hands on. Starts to go a little in the bad direction. This week my computer started to experience a very odd problem. Whenever I move my cursor over a file that is remotely big (let's say 60 megs+) my pc starts to freeze completely. The bigger the file is the longer the pc freezes.

Week 4:

The problem is now always happening and I'm starting to notice a lot of problems with the system ressources. I would say I was losing around 2-5% for every hour the pc was on. By the way my pc is always on so I would easily go down to... 0% free system memory even though absolutely nothing is running.

Week 5:

The session is almost over and I have a lot of work so I can't take the time to backup everything and re-install Win98... Damn...

Lot of cursing during the following 2 weeks.

Week 6:

Even more cursing. About to boot the pc in a physical way.

Week 7:

Only 3 weeks until the end of the session. That's this piece of crap goes out.

Back to Win98...

I can breath again.

Week 10:

Win2000 has made it's way into my pc and is on a roll for a freakin long amount of time. Believe me.

Week 11+:

Start to feel piety for friends of mine running Win98 (I don't know anybody who kept WinME)

 

[xIcculusx]

thnx for the storeis guys , i guess i can share mine too

i have a 2 p3 500's bolth on a be6 2 abit motherboard (hardly &quot;cheap&quot; hardware)
anyway i installed winME on the first one and it was great , the tcp/ip was awesome , turly worthy , was worth the upgrade alone , and that restore feature was kick ass , how many times have you installed bad files in win98se and wished you have had this dandy feature

after a week or so things kinda went down hill , at first
i noticed things were taking a lil longer , like when i right click on a larger file it kinda freezes for a while , or when i hit the history menu on IE it would kinda freeze too , then i started installing firewall and virus scanners (macafee,blackice)

BOOM !!!

winME pukes in my face locks up on boot , and locks up in scandisk everytime it boots
so i try to go in safemode , i click cancel ont he scandisk and all i get is a black screen

ok i must have installed something bad , lets format and re-install , and while im at it , lets install it on my laptop

well to make a long story short , i couldnt get it working at all on my laptop , kept freezeing on boot and scandisk giving me the black screen in safemode , so back to win98se and i might add ihavent has 1 crash or problem with my laptop since i went back to win98se probly 6 months ago

on my desktop's i have tried winME over and over , and sometimes itll work fine sometimes it wont , but in all cases within 3 weeks or so , i notice it starts to bog down and get slower , now im a performance demon , i want the best . maybe some people can handle the slow down and not view it as a problem , but i cant , not with win98se kickin its but in boot time and program opening , so to sum it up , i have not had 1 install of winME satisfy me , i telle veryone i know to aviod it , pointing out its good points and bad points then telling them to run

personaly win2k is my favorite OS , and if you gotta upgrade cause win98se isnt making you happy , thats the OS i recommend now . peace

 

[ThundercatHO]

i haven't had any issues with ME that are any different than 98SE, other than my explorer intelli mouse goes back two web pages intead of one when i use the button on the mouse, but i downloaded new drivers for that and it works ok now....other then that there are a few little quirky things in ME that just kinda happens after a while, but they aren't anything big...