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Windows Me (IPA pronunciation: , ), also known as Windows Millennium Edition is a hybrid 16-bit/32-bit graphical operating system released on September 14, 2000 by Microsoft. It was originally codenamed Millennium. more...

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Overview

A successor to Windows 95 and Windows 98, Windows Me was marketed as a "Home Edition" when compared to Windows 2000 which had been released seven months earlier. It provided Internet Explorer 5.5, Windows Media Player 7, and the new Windows Movie Maker software, which provided basic video editing and was designed to be easy for home users. Microsoft also updated the graphical user interface in Windows Me with some of the features that were first introduced in Windows 2000. Unlike the "Home" edition of Windows XP which would replace Windows Me a year later, Windows Me is not built on the Windows NT architecture of Microsoft's professional operating system at the time. Windows Me is an MS-DOS (Windows 9x) based version like its predecessors but with access to real mode MS-DOS restricted for faster system boot time. This was one of the most publicized changes in Windows Me because applications that needed real mode DOS to run (such as older disk utilities) would not run under the Windows Me operating system.

Compared with other releases, Windows Me had a short shelf-life; it was replaced by Windows XP, which was launched on October 25, 2001.

In 2006, PCWorld declared Windows Me the fourth "Worst Tech Product of All Time" (after AOL, RealPlayer, and Syncronys SoftRAM) because of various technical issues.

New and updated features

System Restore: Windows Me introduced the "System Restore" logging and reversion system, which was meant to simplify troubleshooting and solving problems. It was intended to work as a "safety net" so that if the installation of an application or a driver adversely affected the system, the user could undo the install and return the system to a previously-working state. It did this by monitoring changes to Windows system files and the registry (System Restore is not a backup program). System Restore could slow the computer's performance if it chose to checkpoint the system while a user was using it, and since its method of keeping track of changes was fairly simplistic, it sometimes ended up restoring a virus which the user had previously removed.

Universal Plug and Play: Windows Me was Microsoft's first operating system to introduce support for Universal Plug and Play, often shortened to UPnP.

Windows Image Acquisition: Windows Me also introduced the Windows Image Acquisition API for a standardized and officially supported method of allowing Windows applications to transparently and more easily communicate with image acquisition devices, such as digital cameras and scanners. Before Windows Me and the introduction of WIA, non-standard third party solutions were often common here, leading to incompatibility problems.

Read more at Wikipedia.org