People who hate on an OS for no really firm reason are... interesting in my opinion. I never had Windows ME, but I did have a girlfriend who had it on her machine and it was fine. It had some dopey issues sometimes, but at the end of the day, it worked perfectly fine. I have never had a Windows OS really keep me from doing anything and I have jumped on the "next best thing" fairly fast. I installed Windows 10 on release with no fear of any issues. So far, all I need to do is a clean install of my video card drivers because one game is having issues with PhysX. That's it. In place upgrade and everything seems perfectly fine.
What was particularly bad about 95, ME, Vista, or 8? Can you just define that for me at some level? The only "bad" OS I ever used was the initial release of OS X. It had some legit issues: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_10.0#Criticism_and_Problems
But even that was laying the base for a pretty amazing generation of operating systems for the next 14 years and beyond.
95 took a LOT of memory for the time to run correct.
This was a problem because in those days, the cpu was king, no one was espousing the benefits of doubling your memory, even today, people take memory for granted compared to cpu. I had what was considered at the time one of the most powerful systems you could buy, and certainly one of the best on the military base I was at when a person with 1/3rd the computing power ran rings around me with a bit extra ram. I went out the next week and quadrupled my memory and proceeded to lay waste to everything. I've been using twice the industry average ever since. Other than that, people hated it because compared to Win3.11 it was slow and a massive departure. Once you beefed the system and adjusted, it was good, almost as good as 98, it's just that most people never used 95 on a system properly built for it.
Windows ME is in some ways misrepresented, I will give you that, but not without merit. ME got a reputation partly because of some poor design decisions MS made, sort of like Win8 (not 8.1), but also for stability reasons. Given junk hardware, 98se and ME ran about the same, they crashed, but that was normal back then on Windows, and was a part of life. Those who ran Mac, OS2, BE and Linux knew better, Windows users didn't. The problem came in though when you built a really good system. On a well built system (and an UPS), 98se could almost match XP for stability in the earlier days of XP. Which in the days of Win98, that was fantastic. When you put ME on that same hardware, you became no more stable than a junk system.
Vista was a disaster.
Vista had massive development problems, which lead to rushing it at the end. It was re-written a few times, it was late, finally they just shoved it out the door. SP1 fixed a lot of issues, but not the performance ones, but what it couldn't fix was what MS and pc manufacturers did with after. It was bad for some of the same reasons 95 was bad. When Vista came out, it had huge hardware requirements for the time (which MS understated). HP and (I think) Dell had already invested money on their Vista systems, and they were under powered for even what MS was calling for, so instead of losing money, they convinced MS to scale back the hardware requirements even further to something closer to their current XP machines at the time. This allowed them to sell drastically underpowered machines to people making Vista look like a dog.
If you put enough processor and memory in a Vista box, it can run well, however, it takes almost modern hardware to do so. Back then, to make Vista run well required a $1200-$1500 computer (a good dual core, and 4+gigs of ram), at a time when HP and Dell were selling $400 computers and good ones were around $800-900. Would you spend $1200 just to get a decent computer today? The public wasn't having it, manufacturers knew it, so they just limped along hoping 7 would save them (kid of what they did with
.
Win8 was just poor decision making on MS' part.
They tried using it to leverage their way into tablet sales, a good strategy, but a poorly executed one.
Why? Because a tablet OS intended for a 10in screen doesn't work when blown up onto dual 25in monitors without scaling.
They did a study that showed start menu usage was down 10% on a downward trend and decided they didn't need it. What they failed to see was that people used it as a sub menu to augment their pinned items and desktop icons, a place to shove programs you use less often. That doesn't mean you don't need it or use it, you just use it less, which is actually a good thing, workflow had hit it's stride. While the start menu was no longer the primary focus of the OS, it was still a much needed part, and when I do need it, I certainly don't need it taking over my desktop. It's disjointing and ruins my workflow. 8.1 is better, but it's a bandaid fix, it's still a tablet centric OS shoved onto a desktop. In the end, MS annoyed a lot of people, barely made a scratch in the tablet market, and sold a lot of computers for Apple.
How to tell if an MS OS is a dud, look at how soon they start talking about the next OS.
With ME, they admitted it was a holdover until XP shipped (win2k was supposed to be XP). With XP, they held off new OS talk for quite a while. With Vista, they started talking about 7 before Vista launched. It was months after 7's launch they really started discussing 8. With Win8, they started talking about Windows 9 and 10 months before launch. In other words, they knew it was such a disaster, they were working on marketing the next one before they even finished making the current one. With Win10, they are not only talking about no new OS, only updates, but stating it in advance that they have no other plans, meaning they are very confident in Win10.
