Millennium edition of Windows is 25 years old

Contents

There are Windows versions that were popular and those that are considered stepchildren in the user community. The Millennium Edition, or Windows ME for short, belongs in the latter category, although Microsoft meant well. It was technically the direct successor to Windows 95, 98, and 98 SE. Anyone using one of these predecessor versions received discounted updates, did not have to rethink much, and could continue to use most of the existing software without any problems, even many drivers.

DOS, or not DOS?

One difference was much discussed: In Windows ME, Microsoft had actively hidden DOS. DOS, which was still necessary for starting, was no longer easily accessible to the user. All doors to start it from Windows as the sole operating system on the PC (MS-DOS mode), for example, for BIOS updates or for the use of DOS imagers, were nailed shut. Of course, even before the release of the final version, there were tips for reviving DOS, but one thing remained: formatting a floppy disk no longer created a bootable DOS copy.

Curious: Those who used these tips were advised to use the very latest ME function, System Restore. It was supposed to save the system status and restore it in the event of a disaster—anyone who actively used the Windows 9x family appreciated this. It was necessary to create a checkpoint because otherwise the function would later have deactivated the DOS functionality that had just been restored when the user resorted to it.

Not only with this backup function, but also with the system file protection introduced in ME, Microsoft attempted to counteract the problems that quickly set in after a fresh installation of Windows. Application software had often replaced system libraries in the previous versions, with the result that other programs no longer ran because they were incompatible with the new versions—popularly known as “DLL hell.” The new protection simply kept a copy of the original set and restored the libraries in the event of attacks on the system files.

DLL and update hell

Microsoft did not devise the system file protection specifically for Windows ME but created it for Windows 2000, which was being developed in parallel at the time, and derived it from it. At that time, Windows 95 and Co. were regarded as operating systems for end users, while Windows 2000, which was released before ME, was primarily intended for professionals, i.e., corporate customers. ME was visually similar to the previously released Windows 2000, but it was only with Windows XP that Microsoft succeeded in making professional technology accessible to end users. ME was intended to fill this gap between the second edition of Windows 98 and XP.

If you look at the dramas surrounding Windows updates and upgrades that fail today, Windows ME was a milestone along the way: when upgrading from a previous version, it offered to back up its files—so it should be possible to initiate an upgrade rollback. Unfortunately, the process liked to overwrite these files if the upgrade was not successful—at least if the user agreed to this backup again.

Another headache for users switching to Windows ME: programs that were bothered by the special version specification of Windows ME (after 95, 98) and failed to work for this reason alone. Even Microsoft's own software was affected: c't reported at the time that Service Release 1 for Office 97 could only be installed before upgrading to Windows ME.

Internet intermezzo

With ME, the boundaries between intranet and internet became increasingly blurred. The control panel suddenly looked like a website; the documentation and help files appeared as HTML and integrated online help—the form changed, but not the quality of the content, criticized c't, and saw this as a latent danger that attackers could exploit. The fact that the integrated Internet Explorer browser could not be removed also brought criticism and was grist to the mill of the US judiciary, which was investigating Microsoft for monopolization at the time.

Windows ME quickly disappeared from the scene: one year later, Windows XP was launched in Germany. This meant that DOS was history as a relevant part of Microsoft's operating systems. Behind XP was the completely newly developed technology for Windows NT, which still forms the backbone of Windows today. It should actually have been in Windows for end users earlier.

If you look back at the system requirements of Windows ME today, they sound almost laughable: Microsoft specified a 150 MHz Pentium and 32 MB RAM. At the time, c't used a 450 MHz Pentium III with 128 MB RAM for comparative measurements between ME and Windows 2000 and found no really noticeable differences in performance between professional and hobby Windows. Nobody was talking about processors with multiple cores back then. Technically, only Windows 2000 was capable of using something like this; Windows ME was far from it. (ps)