Why was Windows ME so bad?

I think it was a combination of all a lot of new tech was being dumped on the tail end of Windows 95/98 combined a bit of sloppyness in how it was deployed. Didn't help seeing how well Win 2K could handle this stuff with its NT kernel despite coming out before ME.

I just remembered Windows CEMeNT: "as hard as a rock and as dumb as a brick".

https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/2utm7b/win...

I seem to remember that it was System Restore that slowed it to a crawl

Windows ME was bad, but not due to anything specific they did with ME. Between Windows 95, 98, 98 SE, and then ME the hardware landscape absolutely exploded (e.g. tens of new categories of devices). Which meant more third party drivers than ever before. Drivers ran in the same address space as the kernel, without isolation, and BY DESIGN would monkey-patch the kernel (with different drivers sometimes stepping on one another). This was already a problem in 98/98 SE, but the whole thing just crumbled under its own weight around the time of ME.

2000/XP by contrast had strict user mode/kernel mode isolation, processes had their own virtual memory, and kernel address space was protected (making monkey-patching more difficult). In XP in particular they also started to adopt Driver Signature Enforcement, which at that time brought a cultural rather than technical shift (i.e. everyone knew it would eventually be mandatory, and so started to tighten processes).

Vista then made things even better with Mandatory Driver Signing (64-bit), PatchGuard + ASLR (i.e. no more monkey-patching the kernel), Code Integrity Checks (corruption detection), WDDM for more stable graphics drivers, and shifted some other drivers to user mode (soft failures instead of BSODs).

The official sales pitch of ME over 98 SE was: System Restore (new), System File Protection (technically ported from 2K, but new for the 9x line), faster boot (due to real-mode DOS being removed), Automatic Updates, Movie Maker, and improved home networking. It was a big upgrade for people coming from 98 and still a minor upgrade from 98 SE (which a lot of people skipped, even though it was a substantial improvement for just $20 upgrade cost).

PS - Vista moving to WDDM for graphics drivers, which everyone takes for granted today, is much of the reason why it was SO poorly received upon released. Vendors moved both to WDDM and in some cases to x64 for the first time, and it was a buggy mess there for at least a year -- which was blamed on Vista.

[delayed]

For me - many games runs on DOS.

So in 98SE i can choose to boot in DOS and then type Win to run Windows or run some DOS game.

Also there was specific software that runs only on DOS like SoftICE.

It wasn't bad when you had hardware which had drivers made for ME, or the hardware was supported sufficiently by ME itself. And only used software which didn't rely on kludges which didn't work under ME(anymore).

Which wasn't the reality for most users of the patchworked systems common and available at the time.

https://xkcd.com/323/