Windows ME

~ the goodbye ~

windows me shipped on home pcs around september 2000. i was sixteen, sitting in front of a generic pentium tower in ankara on a 33.6k modem, running windows 98 second edition. i kept 98 second edition for another two years partly out of inertia and partly because every friend who upgraded reported the same problem: a clean install ran fine for a few weeks, then started doing things you could not explain.

what windows me actually was: microsoft's last consumer windows built on the dos-based 9x kernel. the company shipped it september 14 2000 as a stopgap to bridge the wait for windows xp, which was coming the next october on the windows nt kernel and would unify the consumer line with the business line for the first time. to make me feel modern microsoft pulled out real-mode dos boot support and added system restore as the headline new feature. windows movie maker and internet explorer 5.5 also came bundled. the bones underneath were still windows 98.

that combination did not hold up. removing real-mode dos broke compatibility with a long catalog of legacy software and dos games that users kept on hand specifically for that boot path. system restore, the supposed safety net, had bugs that corrupted its own snapshots and made post-install rollbacks unreliable. by mid 2001 the consumer press had given me a nickname it never lost.

~ the chronicle ~

~ how it landed ~

microsoft launched me on september 14 2000 with the slogan "the home pc of the future." initial reviews were mostly positive. pc magazine and pc world wrote up the new media tools approvingly. the system restore demo was the keynote moment, presented as the feature that would end the era of reinstalling windows every six months. retail copies sold reasonably well through the 2000 holiday quarter on the strength of those reviews and the upgrade-from-98 pricing tier.

that goodwill burned off inside two quarters. as soon as the general public was running me on its actual hardware with its actual driver mix the stability problems started showing up in mainstream tech press. ziff davis ran multiple pieces on install failures. various oems quietly started shipping new pcs with the option to downgrade back to 98 second edition. by spring 2001 the joke nickname "mistake edition" was already in print.

~ the decline ~

windows xp arrived on october 25 2001, thirteen months after me, and stole every reason to be on the consumer 9x line. xp used the windows nt kernel that windows 2000 had already carried into the business market, which meant it had real protected memory and far better hardware support out of the box. for home users it just worked in a way me never had. microsoft positioned xp explicitly as the consumer-and-business unification, and the launch ads said nothing about the prior twelve months of me at all.

oems wound down me preinstalls inside a few months. by mid 2002 you basically could not buy a new pc with me on it. mainstream support ended december 31 2003, putting me out of the active patch pipeline just three years after retail launch, the shortest mainstream support window any consumer windows ever got. the extended support cutoff on july 11 2006 was the last microsoft security update the platform received. anyone still running it after that date was on their own.

~ what remains ~

windows me is remembered almost entirely for being bad. that reputation hardened fast and never softened. it sits next to windows vista and windows 8 in the standard "worst microsoft consumer release" lists that get republished every few years on tech-nostalgia sites, but vista and 8 at least had the nt kernel underneath them. me did not. it was the last gasp of an architecture microsoft itself had already decided to abandon.

system restore is the one me feature that survived. windows xp inherited it and fixed the bugs, and every windows release since then has shipped a version of it. windows movie maker stayed alive through windows 7 before finally shipping its last version in 2017. the bigger inheritance was negative: me made the internal case at microsoft for never trying to ship another major release on the 9x kernel, and the company kept that promise. every consumer windows after me has been an nt descendant. me is the gravestone marking the boundary.

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