Will Windows Vista be Remembered as the New ME?

There is a serious question being whispered on the Internet: Will Vista be remembered as another ME? People have taken their sides but mostly the answers are based on an implicit assumption that Windows 7 will deliver all its promises.

In this article, we try to look objectively at both operating systems. What they did right and what they did wrong, why they failed, and why they were or should be praised.

Windows Millennium Edition (ME) was released in 2000 as the successor of Windows 98 SE.

Many new features were announced by the people from Redmond. Among these were improved Universal Plug 'n Play, or UPnP, System Snapshots and System Restore, and automatic Windows Updates from Microsoft's website. These were exciting new features at that time, almost unbelievable in how futuristic and advanced they sounded.

However, things did not work out exactly as expected. Early adopters had problems with basic installation. It seemed that one needed to be both clever and lucky just to complete the installation. One also needed to luckier still to have all the PC's hardware work properly. This was due to a security decision made in ME: drivers for non-Plug 'n Play devices were not allowed to be installed. This resulted in huge compatibility issues. A large number of users were unable to get their hardware working correctly, and the system might crash several times per day or week. If one were fortunate enough to have a system that would run somewhat reliably, the fun was not over because the system might simply refuse to shut down.

These problems lasted for years and some were not addressed until Windows XP was released. It was so bad that Millennium Edition’s abbreviation ME was popularly said to stand for “Mistake Edition.”

Was ME all bad? Actually, no. Millennium Edition introduced many features that are still in use today (albeit improved): automatic updates, system file protection, system configuration utility, system monitor, Windows Movie Maker, Windows image acquisition, image preview, Home Networking Wizard, improved power management, compressed folders, on-screen keyboard (which was also present in Windows 3.1), generic drivers for USB mass storage devices, and the TCP/IP stack which was implemented from Windows 2000 code. (Windows 2000 was part of the separate Windows NT line. Windows 9.x and ME were eventually merged with the NT line to become Windows XP.)

At Vista's launch, a potential user need to have a certain level of hardware performance. This proved to be a much higher level than what some manufacturer's, with Microsoft's blessings, presented in their machines labeled "Vista Capable." Vista was also resource intensive. Few Windows XP machines had more than 1 GB of RAM. Vista wasn't really happy (which is needed to make the user happy) in less than 2 GB of RAM. Vista also needed 15 to 40 GB of hard drive space, depending on the version installed (at a time when 30 GB was considered an average hard drive space for a notebook).

How well the machine met the hardware requirements requirments determined which version to run. Retail boxes included Vista Home Basic, Vista Home Premium, and Vista Ultimate. A stripped-down version called Vista Starter was not offered to end users, as was another version called Vista Enterprise.

Once the version was selected, the user had to be lucky, once again, to get all the hardware working. Microsoft had changed some of the driver APIs, and many hardware vendors struggled to get their updates out, some of which came long after Vista's release. This was not just a question of newer or older hardware, either. Even some Microsoft executives had problems getting Windows Windows to run on theirPCs. One executive speculated that the accessory providers were not motivated to work on Vista drivers because "No one really believed we would ever ship so they didn't start the work until very late in 2006."