Ha ha, yeah, Windows ME was hilariously unstable. Hilarious in retrospect; not so funny at the time and if you'd forked out cash for the thing.

By that time I had definitively moved to the NT family and was a good deal happier.

On reflection the only Windows versions I was ever genuinely impressed by at pre-release or early-RTM stage were 2000 and 7. 7 in particular, even in the early betas, was already so much more performant and stable than Vista ever was.

Right now I love me some 8.1, but it took Microsoft long enough to get there. I have serious concerns about 10. It's still sufficiently rough in the Insider previews that I just can't see RTM going well, and it concerns me that they're doing such a heavy push on features that very few people will ever bother using.

There seems to be some bizarre disease inside Microsoft where every few years they take a fit and decide to throw away all of their previous good work. I saw this with the 2003 stuff, which was very good and just needed some polishing and better integration to really get to the next level. Instead we got Vista. 7 fixed everything that was wrong with Vista, then they threw it all away with 8. 8.1 with updates finally got that to the stage where it was a good OS, and now they're throwing it all away again.

Isn't the quality of MS OS toggling from version to version ? It is like MS is doing some new drastically invention in a single version followed by a stabilised version:

95 hmmm (new)

98 aahhhh (stable)

ME urrgg (new)

XP aaahhhhh (stable)

Vista urrrrggg (new)

7 aaaahhhhh (stable)

8 urrrrgggggg (new)

now it is time for a new aaahhhhhh, let's hope.

95 hmmm (new)
98 aahhhh (stable)
ME urrgg (new)
XP aaahhhhh (stable)
Vista urrrrggg (new)
7 aaaahhhhh (stable)
8 urrrrgggggg (new)

now it is time for a new aaahhhhhh, let's hope.

Unluckily, after 8 comes 9, and Microsoft (knowing their own history, obviously) deliberately named it 10. That is an omen for urrrrgggggg.

Unluckily, after 8 comes 9, and Microsoft (knowing their own history, obviously) deliberately named it 10. That is an omen for urrrrgggggg.

Yeah... a bad omen indeed. On the other hand I've a habit to stick to the bad OS versions (still using vista ) .

But it could be better than Win 11, where you likely need to walk through a virtual maze using your VR gear to swap to the start menu

Isn't the quality of MS OS toggling from version to version ? It is like MS is doing some new drastically invention in a single version followed by a stabilised version:

95 hmmm (new)

98 aahhhh (stable)

ME urrgg (new)

XP aaahhhhh (stable)

Vista urrrrggg (new)

7 aaaahhhhh (stable)

8 urrrrgggggg (new)

now it is time for a new aaahhhhhh, let's hope.

Not quite, cos the 9x line ended with ME, whereas 2000 and onwards (including XP, Vista, etc) are based on the NT line. For the NT line it looks more like a long line of stability up to Vista (although XP was almost universally despised on release), at which point Microsoft just went totally lamppost.

Vista also brought with it a major change in driver setup so instability initially was understandable (although using it from launch the only problem I can think of was an NVidia driver which would bluescreen on video play back, no problems from my AMD drivers before and after) and Win7 didn't make a massive change so the stability from then onwards is to be expected. Vista's biggest problem was a collective 'waaaah' before it was released (leads to many people saying "I've never used it but it is crap") and higher memory usage due to the 'window in video and system ram at the same time' WDDM1.0 thing.

Win8.x isn't unstable either, everyone just has a massive collective cry about the UI they don't like; the kernel itself was the best they have done so far with some really nice changes under the hood.

I'm using win8.1 at home and have zero problem with it, the only change I've made was to install Start8 simply because, yes, the UI doesn't suit a desktop very well but ya know what, I'm ok with that, sometimes you have to try a thing to learn from it and learning they are.

And the whines will continue in 5..4..3..2..

Ha ha, yeah, Windows ME was hilariously unstable

I was a kid at the time, I thought blue screens were a normal thing :3

phantom, on 07 May 2015 - 11:10 AM, said:

And the whines will continue in 5..4..3..2..

There is so much smug in your post that I can fucking eat it and survive on it for two weeks.

Only two weeks?

God damn it, I'm slipping... I should be able to produce at least a months worth of smug and maybe a week or two of "I'm better than you" for people to snack on..

Come on Phantom, get your shit together...

Come on Phantom, get your shit together...

Yeah man, at this rate all those unemployed indie developers that depend on your smug production will starve before making their game.

Windows Vista was also a bleh experience for me, but mainly owing to the resources it consumed. Back in 200 AD computers weren’t up to it.

L. Spiro