welcome back to the adventure this is Adam and today we're debunking myths
about Windows millennium edition we will get started right after this
a common misconception about why millennium edition was poorly received
is that the operating system was rushed to market at the time Windows 2000 would
soon be released for businesses but the consumer version was not yet ready in an
official statement from Microsoft they had said windows 98 would be the last in
the 9x series however the platform was aging and Microsoft needed something to
bridge the gap before Windows XP this sounds reasonable until you dig a little
deeper on March 30th 1999 Microsoft announced that it would be dividing the
company into five new divisions one of which is the consumer Windows division
previously the consumer Windows team developed under Jim al Chin's Windows
team which at the time was working to complete Windows 2000 when it became
obvious that a consumer version of Windows 2000 was not possible the
consumer windows team began work on a final release of the wind 9x product
line which was previously shelved by auction and others at Microsoft that
wished to see the company move to an all NT codebase on April 7th 1999 at the
windows hardware engineering conference Microsoft President Steve Ballmer
announced that the company would release a major follow up to Windows 98 se which
was due to ship later that spring early design ideas included an activity center
based on work done by the Neptune team to find out more about Microsoft Neptune
follow the card above the goal for millennium edition ended up being to
simply improve on Windows 98 rather than offer something dramatically different
so now we know how millennium Edition came to be but was development rushed
for some arbitrary reason development does not appear to have been rushed
there were 24 builds released the testers over the 11 months the operating
system was in development this may sound like a short period of time by today's
standards but back then it was par for the course windows 98 se was only in
development for six months millennium Edition received the same treatment as
other versions of Windows up to and including TV commercials
when millennium Edition was released in September of 2000 home computer users
were still running das programs and games naturally when you take an
existing feature out of an operating system you are going to upset the user
base that relied on that feature this wasn't the last time a very popular
feature was removed from a Windows operating system if you recall the Start
menu was removed from Windows 8 that didn't go over very well with consumers
however dos wasn't really removed it was just hidden this is where the
misconception starts if dos was removed then surely millennium edition would be
a 32-bit operating system right nope millennium edition is still a 16 /
32-bit hybrid operating system and just like Windows 98
so millennium Edition doesn't run on top of DOS then right this is also not the
case millennium Edition does run on top of das the user just can't access real
mode DOS like you could in Windows 98 millennium edition actually came with an
updated version of ms-dos 8.0 this issue may seem really difficult to
reconcile you may have had a very frustrating experience with millennium
addition it is also entirely possible that you had no issues the entire time
you used it so how are some users plagued with crashes and others enjoy a
highly stable crash free operating system let's start with the issue of
bugs in general the purpose of alpha and beta releases or so testers can report
back bugs they find bugs can be all manner of issues with the operating
system from spelling errors and applets to behavior crashes and exploits that
compromise the system Microsoft has a threshold of up to 500 bugs that they
will allow in an operating system and release by no account was millennium
Edition released with more than 500 previously identified bugs however there
are some inherent flaws in the wind' 9x architecture this is not specifically an
issue with millennium edition as every entry in the series had the same flaws
on the issue of stability there is a known problem with using drivers
designed for Windows 98 under millennium edition if you have a computer that was
running Windows 98 and you upgraded to ME you probably had a very frustrating
experience if you purchase an OEM system that had any pre-installed you may have
had the crash free experience we will see something similar happen again with
Windows Vista Microsoft allowed OMS time to develop their apps and drivers for
the new platform but they simply didn't because there's no money in writing
drivers in both cases Microsoft took the blame and the reputation for Emme and
Vista were badly hurt this stems from improving how drivers work that breaks
the compatibility while Windows 98 drivers would usually install they cause
other problems like well-known crashes that were very difficult to link back to
the driver the key reasons users point to for millennium edition being bad are
simply myths follow the card above to find out why millennium Edition is
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