My stepdad used ME for a few years on his HP laptop, which eventually died of AC failures, bad motherboard (bad tech support), and failing to boot up that had nothing to do with the previous two errors. It sits in the hardware cabinet (chest full of cables, mice, etc) to this very day .
ME: Masochism Edition

let's get the chronology straight:

there are two different trees, with completely different code bases, that were developed in parallel:

Dos -> win1/2/3 -> win95 -> win98 -> ME

these are all shells on top of a DOS code base... the old school way of doing things, they required Dos to be installed also.

WinNT -> 2000 -> XP

totally different codebase. What MS did was hired one of the main VMS architects to help write a new OS that had a better design than the old DOS+shell thingy. Hence, NT. It is still terribly flawed, but is more stable due to the fact that it borrows some concepts from VMS relating to memory management etc. that theoretically should have made it work well... Unfortunately, the MS coders were the ones who wrote it.

ME: new gui, a couple of new (useless) features...bah.

what i thought from doing the history of ict was that the 9x series wasnt infact dos but it was actually a difrent typ of NT but not as developed as far and by difrent people, the kernal is kind of like half NT, and if ME did have all the security features removed it would be on a FAT file system as with NTFS it has a lot of security features in it for access controle which again would suggest that it is NT with all the security features removed! could be wrong though, but that is what i have beed led to believe

berrance