Eh. I remember ME. It was the worst version of Windows at the time, but obviously predated Vista and 8. ME generated a lot of bad press, but it was mostly stability stuff that was quickly fixed. Vista was terrible and only ever got slightly less terrible before Windows 7 arrived. Windows 8 was so frustrating (from a usability standpoint) that I defected to Mac.

In any case, it's not meant to be an exhaustive list ...

It's funny because I felt Vista was perfectly fine as an OS, whereas ME was almost unusable (with the stability issues you mentioned). Vista was just boring, not great, but it worked. So it surprises me that so many people were frustrated by it.

Maybe I just hot lucky with my hardware choices at the time.

> So it surprises me that so many people were frustrated by it.

That might have been (in part) due to all of the underpowered PCs sold with "Windows Vista Capable" badges, IIRC there was a class-action lawsuit because of it.

My experiences are the same. I got a laptop around that time (one that promised an upgrade to Vista for free). XP would crash and blue screen about once a month. With Vista it never crashed or blue screened at all, and I was using it heavily for months. I built a PC soon after, which did blue screen with Vista, but I suspect it was the NVidia drivers (laptop had an ATI GPU).

I agree, Vista was boring, in the sense that it just worked and didn't get in the way. Now that I think about it, the built in Start Menu search bar made it awesome.

Vista, after a few service packs, was somewhat usable, but still a performance hog. It felt like an early alpha build of Win7 (once that came out).

Oh, WinME had much worse issues than just some crash here or there. As someone who at that time made a living by (among other things) deploying, maintaining and repairing Windows PCs at various small business offices, it was a nightmare.

Every install behaved differently and had random failures which were gone without a trace after a reboot, never to appear again. Troubleshooting a non-booting WinME box was a nightmare compared to troubleshooting a Win98 box with similar issues, which had all kinds of emergency "shell" with dozens of useful utilities (which were absent in WinME, with no replacement), and a "safe mode" which was actually useful and predictable.

The Control Panel, and all the GUI around configuration was a difficult to use abomination, stuck somewhere halfway between utilitarian look&feel of Win98 and sleek look of WinXP, with all the disadvantages and none of the advantages of either.

My personal mileage with ME was that it would hum along fine, but at some point would become unstable. Once it became unstable, the best solution was to reimage it. Whatever would break did not seem to ever get better, regardless of any attempts to find or fix the issue. So the first crash, just start reimaging.

Of course, I was used to reimaging my Windows machines at the time anyway. That's something that's mostly gone away, and I think one of the better (but mostly invisible) advances in Windows.

I occasionally felt that ME was so bad in order to push the last holdouts finally into the 32-bit era.

Presumably, you mean the NT-era and off the Windows 95 descended code base, but as I recall it was exactly the opposite: the ME that was released was something of a last-minute rush job because, it was supposed to be an NT-based OS, but that wasn't ready and was effectively delayed until XP.

ME was 32 bit... I think what you mean to say is to push the last hold outs into the NT on the desktop era.

NT was on the desktop! I think you mean in the home.

That didn't happen until people started using Windows XP. I only saw a few businesses using NT or Windows 2000, but I don't recall many people running those versions in their home computers.