This is what I understand about Win98, Win98SE, and WinME:
Win98 was the merging of IE and Win95B. It was reasonably good, but still quite buggy as most first versions of software are. (At least in this day and age where software testing seems to consist only of it the splash screen looks cool enough.)
Win98SE was Win98 with a lot of bug fixes, so that it crashed a lot less often and recovered from IE crashes a lot better. (Before if IE crashed in 98, you were royally screwed, and now in 98SE if IE crashed you were just kind of screwed.)
WinME was Win98SE with a wicked twist. All 16-bit code was removed. This is why there is no more DOS mode in ME, because DOS is strictly 16-bit. Of course, a LOT of software for Windows is still at least partially 16-bit, especially drivers.
What does this mean, that a LOT of drivers in WinME are unstable. And because a lot of the OS was re-written, ME is inherantly slightly buggy of it's own accord as well.
Ultimately, WinME is nothing more than Win98SE with the 16-bit code stripped out and with a few 'new' features that you can download for free from MS anyway, such as the new Windows Media Player revision.
So 99.99% of the people in the world are better off using Win98SE than WinME.
But, of course, Microsoft would say otherwise because they got rid of that 'nasty' 16-bit legacy code for you.
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And, as a special added bonus, Win2000, what it is and isn't:
Windows 2000 is Windows NT 5. Why the different name? Because Microsoft was hoping beyond all hope that home users would go to 2000 and they could drop the Win9x support entirely. This is because the NT kernel does have many advantages over the 9x kernel, most of which though are things like communication protocols that most computer users wouldn't have a clue about, but would allow for considerably more useful software.
Windows2000 is more than just NT though. It's NT and 9x combined. As such it can run any software written for 9x or NT. In theory. The flaw with this though is two fold:
1) Win2000 uses NT type drivers. A good number of products like video cameras don't support NT at all, and a large number of companies seem to have difficulty writing stable NT drivers because they have so few NT customers and thus put all of their resources into the 9x drivers. This means that Win2000 won't run some hardware, and on occasion may be unstable because some cheap-arsed company wrote bad drivers for their hardware. (Such as VIA.)
2) Microsoft actually did quite a few things to improve the performance of the Win2000 kernel/API over NT and 9x. Such examples are when memory is freed, that freed memory is the first to be selected for use again because quite often it will be physically closer to the other memory that the program that requested the memory us using. Where as in Win9x, it just grabs the next bit of memory at the end of the memory and only re-uses memory when it finally runs out of memory at the end to grab, often putting a considerable physical difference between the pieces of memory software has reserved.
While this sounds very good to do things like this because it improved performance, many lazy software engineers did things like free memory and then continue using it anyway. In Win9x this usually didn't matter because that memory wouldn't be over-written until the system ran out of new memory to allocate. In Win2000 however, it makes this freed memory to be used right away and gets overwritten quickly, thus revealing the bugs that the lazy programmers left in their code by continuing to use memory after they freed it.
So, a lot of poorly written code will run under Win9x with stability still, while under Win2000 it will often crash. This is not because Windows2000 is buggy, but because the software being run is buggy. But everyone likes to blame the OS, not their precious game.
Okay. Now that I see you've all nodded off and fallen to sleep, I'll start to rant on ... hey, what's that cane thing? Hey!!!! I still have more to say.... [gurgle] [choke]
<pre><font color=orange>Sunnova</font color=orange> <font color=blue>Beach</font color=blue>, <i>ain't life a beach?</i></pre><p>
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