All right, I will concede on the ACPI support. But my solution to ACPI problems (and I do not doubt that it can cause problems with software that doesn't support it) is to simply disable power management as much as possible.

keropi wrote:

As you can see WDM support is implemented nativelly and not as an add-on patch working alongside the older VxD driver system

But this is an exaggeration. If WDM support was an "add-on patch" in SE it would be much easier to add or remove.

It depends on what you want to actually do with your old OS setup valnar.
I could not care less for VxD for example for sound support since I use a SB Live 5.1.
The games I will play on it are Glide/D3D window ones (no plans for anything DOS since I got another machine for that) and I actually don't really plan to use it for anything more than the above games and some basic web surfing to download patches etc... I just needed some 9x environment that is "stable" with my hardware. The use of a usb2 card for example was just for pure convenience and I could live without it but luckily it seems I won't need to remove it again. I am not looking to make an installation for every-day use or have all up-to-date components in my setup. Just something to work without much worries.
Basically for my case it is either 98SE or ME. Anything newer than that just won't work.

Jorpho wrote:

All right, I will concede on the ACPI support. But my solution to ACPI problems (and I do not doubt that it can cause problems with software that doesn't support it) is to simply disable power management as much as possible.

keropi wrote:

As you can see WDM support is implemented nativelly and not as an add-on patch working alongside the older VxD driver system

But this is an exaggeration. If WDM support was an "add-on patch" in SE it would be much easier to add or remove.

Simply disabling ACPI is not the best solution now, is it? Since when disabling hardware features to make it compatible with software is an acceptable solution?
The WDM implementation was not done overnight. Win98 offers support for it but only preliminary. It was not built with just WDM in mind and all the patches of the world can't offer the same integration as an OS that has this from the start and was build having it in mind. I am not sayin ME is perfect in this section, but it handles things better than win98SE + patches.

keropi wrote:

Simply disabling ACPI is not the best solution now, is it? Since when disabling hardware features to make it compatible with software is an acceptable solution?

Because ACPI is fairly useless on a desktop PC that you're using for Glide and D3D games, especially if it boots up quickly.

The WDM implementation was not done overnight. Win98 offers support for it but only preliminary. It was not built with just WDM in mind and all the patches of the world can't offer the same integration as an OS that has this from the start and was build having it in mind.

Do you have a specific, official source for this information? Because if we're just speculating wildly, then I propose that VXD support was just hacked out of ME, much like its real-mode MS-DOS.

Jorpho, at this point I won't add anything to the conversation with you. Not that I can't but I feel it is pointless. Your last post is proof of that.
I stated my experience, you can get my hardware config from my previous posts, you can read what problems I had. That's it. Draw your own conclusions and stop forcing your opinions or theories on others. I don't have the obligation to convince you, agree with you or even go to extreme lengths to find an "official source" to back up my statements in order to convince you. All I originally stated is that ME behaves better on my hardware. You can't live with that? Too bad I don't really care.

keropi wrote:

Draw your own conclusions and stop forcing your opinions or theories on others.

Likewise, kthx.

Jorpho wrote:

keropi wrote:

Draw your own conclusions and stop forcing your opinions or theories on others.

Likewise, kthx.

yeahhh.... you keep on trollin' Jorpho...

I have to agree with Keropi on this one and again strictly from my experience when ME was first released.

I had an AMD K6-2/450 machine with an S3 Virge and Voodoo 2 card combo, pretty sure I was only running 256MB of ram at the time.

It worked well, not really fast and not slow either.

I'm pretty sure I was had already gotten my Ensonique Soundscape card and was using that, but also I had moved up to a Promise PCI Controller card too instead of using the onboard IDE ports.

Now as for using more current hardware, I currently dual-boot with 2K on a P4/3.2GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM with the patches installed, it absolutely screams now...

keropi did mention he has no intention of using pure DOS on his rig, so 98SE isn't needed in his case. Also, if 98SE causes problems with his hardware which don't occur with his ME install then he's better off using ME.
granted, XP is more stable then ME is, but requires more powerful hardware to run as snappy as ME. Also, XP has the nasty activation stuff. Sure there are things that can be done about that but that's one more tweak XP will need over ME.
Try running XP on a 400Mhz system with just 192MB ram and watch it crawl. ME will fly on it!

valnar wrote:

It's a jack of all trades and master of none.

It does make ME the master of the jack of all trades, which it seems keropi is looking for 😜

Edit:Woopsy, forgot this thread now has 3 pages instead of 2. Well, no need to delete it all though.

Regarding ACPI, it is indeed often a source of quirky problems with 9x OSs. The IRQ choices it makes and the IRQ sharing support of the OS and drivers are not great. Switching to APM mode is not really any sort of downgrade. There are a number of old motherboards from those times that don't support ACPI correctly and obviously Windows' ACPI support was rather new as well.

Disabling ACPI with any 9x OS (incl ME) is done during setup with a command line setting ("/p i"). Some BIOSs let you disable ACPI too. You have to do it during OS setup though or it will make a big mess when it redetects all of your hardware.

The only real downside that I know of to using APM instead of ACPI is that your CPU may not idle as well as it could. With ACPI, Windows sends the HLT command to the CPU which reduces power consumption considerably when idle. You can replace this functionality easily by getting Rain, however. I seem to recall APM doing HLT in some cases though....

Another interesting consideration is that "PNP OS" option in most BIOSs. This affects whether the BIOS or Windows does the PNP IRQ decisions. Apparently having the BIOS do IRQ configuration can be a source of problems. I don't know what to make of this. Enabling PNP OS mode complicates ISA PNP cards in DOS though (you need a PNP config util).

i tried winme years ago and all i have to say is that its indeed a lot more unstable than win98se.
if your retro rig have less than 64mb of ram or a 486/sub-100 pentium, win95osr2 may be best choice. otherwise, go straight to win98se.

noshutdown wrote:

i tried winme years ago and all i have to say is that its indeed a lot more unstable than win98se.
if your retro rig have less than 64mb of ram or a 486/sub-100 pentium, win95osr2 may be best choice. otherwise, go straight to win98se.

I have to make a note here:
Out of the box, ME has several problems causing it to be a lot more unstable then it potentially can be. Many causes for instability can be solved by doing some standard tweaks and by installing IE6 with SP1 (IE is a major cause of instability in ME, but this has more to do with the version of IE ME came with).

Another thing: How stable a system is will also depend on what hardware the OS is installed on. Sometimes 98SE can be more unstable on a particular system then ME (kerobi experienced this, for example. I've tried 98SE once myself also and also didn't like it's performance. imo 98SE has a lot of annoying issues itself which are solved in ME).

Personally I'd install ME on any system that has less then 128MB ram and/or a processor running at 300Mhz or below (ram is the more important variable here imo).

I have build one 486 and installed 95B on it but I am tempted to try 98SE on one, tweaked to make it run more light.

I have never used Windows ME, and so my question is noob-like. Say you were to set up two PCs. One had 98SE, the other had ME. Then, say you were to test some sound cards on both machines. How about:

Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Terratec DMX 6fire
Creative Audigy 2 ZS

I've specifically chosen these 3 sound cards because they appeared late on in the "Windows 98 era timeline". They all have Windows 98 drivers. I don't know if they have Windows ME drivers, but I strongly suspect that they do. I think the first two sound cards in the list above only have WDM drivers, whereas the last card has both a WDM and a VxD driver.

My question - if you carefully evaluate these cards' overall performances on both test machines, would you notice any difference? Would the 3 cards, using their WDM drivers on the Win ME PC, sound and perform any better than on the Win 98 PC, also using WDM drivers.

I don't know, but you could always try a dualboot with both OS'es. If you don't already have ME, I find it may be getting harder to find a copy in the future for a reasonable price. I like having as many OS'es in my database as I can while they can be gotten relatively cheap. I have original disks of almost any Windows since 95, just not all in the same language 🤣.

Yes you're right, I noticed that ME is getting scarce these days. I don't own a copy. I might have to locate one, before they all disappear. It's strange how many copies of Win 95 and 98 can still be bought on ebay. Even DOS on floppy disks!

Yup, better start hunting! ME never was as popular so not many copies are floating around to begin with. Particularly the full Retail version is harder to get.
My 1st one was a Dutch oem version with key, original and unused which I got years ago for €15. Later I was gifted an ungrade version and at someother place I bought a small stack of weird looking MS disks which later turned out to include somekind of ME volume license version with the key on the disk itself.
Not so long ago I was lucky enough to find an Ebay seller selling a small lot of English Retail versions and I bought a copy. It was NOS 😁

Edit:The Retail version has I think one drawback...it's not bootable.
Edit2: The Retail version has the brown holodisk while the rest are the silver-ish ones.

I wonder if I can locate some of old original diskettes, I've located both my MS-DOS and Windows 95 Upgrade Disk's.

I think I still have some copies of NT3.5 and NT4.0 lying about.

Found an interesting post on MSFN.org which lists a lot of positive things about ME.

Link: http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/61407-service … post__p__841393

In case the link doesn't work or gets deleted, I'll paste it here:

ME is not for DOS-Freaks.

ME is a modern Multimedia general purpose OS for a networked multimedia Home or a personal Laptop.

ME is the most evolved Win9x OS and is more stable than 95,98 and SE.

Don't buy the "Me is Beta" phrase that everybody badmouthes ME. The Truth : it shipped with prereleases of IE 5.5 and WMP 7.0, now what's that about - install IE 5.5 final or IE6 and WMP 7.1 or 9 and voila everythings solved. In fact the german ME edition came on two CDROMs : one OS, and one with WMP 7.0 final plus some bonus stuff to satisfy customers. The systemresore bug is a bug indeed, but theres a well-known and available hotfix and afterwards its solved. Systemresore works exactly like in XP and it is very reliable.

It's few glitches can all be worked out, in generally it depends all on compatible Drivers : ME had the same problem as vista - when it came out there were only 98 drivers around, but ME wants WDM only. Otherwise ACPI wont work and system stability is in danger.Another thing to consider is that ME needs a lot of CPU power and RAM. 500 MhZ and far more than 128 MB will work wonders.

ME has capabilities not found elsewhere in win 9x :


full ACPI aware: improving cold boot time, pre and post-logon boot times and time required for resuming from hibernation, OS-controlled ACPI S4 sleep state and other power management features without manufacturer-supplied drivers

WDM Driver modell throughout the OS, less use of VXDs for more stability. Needed for ACPI to work its magic.

Windows Image Acquisition (WIA) instead of TWAIN , still used in XP, support for PICT-Cameras and Scanners ( lots modern devices use this protocol ).

Universal Plug and Play ( UpNp) , detects devices on the network automatically.

Built in Windows 2000 TCP/IP and NDIS networking stack and architecture, more reliable, full-featured, stable and offered better performance over the 98SE stack .

Support for networking over FireWire, IrDA, ( Bluetooth capable with 3rd party drivers like Toshibas famous stack ) a network diagnostic troubleshooter, outstanding Home Networking Wizard which let people share folders,printers or set up a connection-sharing with offline-machines.

native USB support for Mass-storage Devices and external CD/DVD devices, better USB-printer support.

native Firewire support, for DV-Camcorders and the like (think of the Moviemaker application )

far better memory handling than 98SE, especially if more than 256MB Ram is present. Depending on mainboard you wont have to workaround the 512MB - "bug", I have seen PCs with 1GB and ME without any tweak running stable.

Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) , Distributed COM+ ,MDAC and JET database working in background like in XP, mainly used for diagnostic-wizards and the PC-Health services like :

SystemRestore, automatic Regstry backups,Signature-Checkers for Files ( ME uses *.CAT files like 2000 and XP ), resulting in System File Protection, automatic recovery of overwritten or deleted core-files ( that's why a Servicepack is hard work, you cannot simply overwrite OS-files with custom ones )

Help and Support Center is by far more userfriendly and interesting to use than 98SE's HTMl-Help. You can access the Microsoft Knowledgebase / Support website inside this application. When you click on the support options you get access to DXdiag,Systeminfo, WMI,Dr Watson and all other system-diagnosis tools. Built in wizards and Troubleshooters.

Multimedia inside, unseen in any Consumer-OS before : MovieMaker , WMP , Internet Games, DirectX Voice chat,DVD,Onlinestuff, MS Agent "merlin" as your talking OOBE- wizard makes this the total multimedia-Windows out of the Box .
DVD player supports software decoding for playback of DVD movies without a dedicated decoder card


Better and feature rich Windows 2000 like Explorer :


Image Preview: In Windows Me, images can be viewed by using the Image Preview utility. It allows users to rotate an image, print or zoom in/out an image. Image Preview supports images with .BMP, .DIB, .EMF, .GIF, .JPEG, .PNG, .TIF and .WMF file formats.

Compressed Folders: Windows Me includes support for ZIP files through a shell extension known as Compressed Folders; allows users to create, access and extract files from ZIP archives similar to a regular folder in Windows. The user can also restrict access to files with a password.

Search facility is integrated into Windows Explorer ( very much like the XP one )

Accessibility extras : Onscreen Keyboard,magnifier, Speech .. prettty good for people that need it.


Well.. that's not all, but the topnotch argument to choose this over 98 my friend.

last my own extra Remark : I have a MS wired keyboard 500 with multimedia buttons, pause/play/Home/Favorites/Calc and such..

In Windows 98 and 2000 I need " the Intellitype software" to make them work..

Only In ME and XP they work without any running software at all 😉

Those little surprises are worth it, believe it or not..

Like I said it is NOT for DOS-freaks..

but for XP-feature seeking and multimedia-loving people on older or less powerful hardware or the need to have games and apps running fast as possible ( I do a lot of Photoshop 7, Poser 5 on a 256MB equipped ME Machine - dont even think of that under XP !).

Edit: Ugh, the formatting looks horrible so it's preferred to read the original post I linked to. I can't be bothered to duplicate the excellent post formatting provided in the post I copied. Sry 🤣

I've installed the Vortex 2 and PowerVR PCX2 drivers on ME without issue and I think they are VXD. ME's WDM requirement doesn't seem as strict as I keep reading....

I am running ME on a ASUS TUSL2-C with 512MB and a P3 1400. It is quite acceptable. It definitely seems to boot faster than 98SE did on this setup. But I don't think I'd start a fight either way about 98SE vs. ME. The differences aren't that tangible / critical / bothersome / amazing / etc. :D

I haven't installed any hotfixes. I did disable System Restore and installed DX 8.1. I use Opera 10 on it and don't use IE.

PCX2 drivers are definitely VXD-based and can not install on any NT