windows 98 vs windows me

hey guys im thinking of building a old Pentium 3 pc for some old games and some dos games i was wondering what would be the best operating system to use windows 98 or windows me. and if anyone would know where to get unofficial service packs from thanks.

 

If it has an Intel chipset - ME, if not probably 98SE

 

ME was an abomination to behold. I would strongly recommend 98SE.

 

ME was great for me but then I had an Intel chipset based machine.

98SE required quite a bit of patching. But most of the resources online will be 98 based.

If you end up with a VIA or something like that 98SE would be a better choice.

 

Well around that time when ME was released, I owned an IT factory & was cranking out desktops with it installed. Believe me, you don't want to know how many returns we had due to drivers/crashing/random errors + a million other issues which I've long tried to blot from my memory. I still have nightmares to this very day.

98SE on the other hand was perfect.

 

i'd say 98/98SE, i always had memory leaks with ME. if you had the resource monitor open you could see the RAM creep up until there was none left then things would start to crash. none of the patches fixed it, aside from that i really didn't mind ME.
in terms of patches and services packs for windows 98/ME the windows update should still work. i was using windows update on a windows 98 machine a couple of years ago. even though it's not supported the servers were still up, maybe someone in the retro area can confirm if they're still up.

 

critical thing for 98SE is to get the memory bug fixed (the +512MB one).

 

i never really had much of a problem with ME.

never had much of a problem with 98se for that matter.
i used to use some unofficial service pack for se.
it was some third party thing that installed all sorts of cool things and fixes.

 

98 SE with the unofficial service pack.

http://www.htasoft.com/u98sesp/

 

this. +1000

 

+1, was stable as hell when I was a young kid and tinkering with everything.

 

I did Beta testing for Microsoft for many years from Windows 98 first edition right through to Windows 7. Windows ME was just a disaster waiting to happen as finding bugs in that OS was literally like shooting fish in a barrel. Such an easy beta to bug and I have the T-shirt to prove it! (Made the Top 100 Beta Tester list). Not sure if that is a good or a bad thing!

Definitely stick with Windows 98 SE.

 

Easy to debug a PRE Alpha OS released to the public

One thing MS did actually do well during that release was marketing, I remember the flashy adds & pretty graphics that came with ME.

This is the reality. Welcome to Windows ME.

 

It was because of the whole 2000 "new millenium" thing. They were mixing things up, doing things a little different, probably showed in their programming lol. The Beta CD's were quite interesting as they were pretty bland up until then. Goes to show they were trying to be a little more creative when doing things.

 

lol idk my windows ME when i had it was far more stabled then windows 98 running on a P3 with a TNT2 graphics . BSODs was rare as hen's teeth and was more stabled then XP till SP1 came

still just to throw another option in since this is a P3 box why not XP?

 

maybe windows 98 would be a good choice i heard you cant access dos in windows me even though me runs on top of dos..

 

I used to run this as well as 98SE for those games that ran in DOS.

https://winworldpc.com/product/quickmenu/1x

 

I read this whole thread thinking you were asking about 98 vs windows ce. haha.

windows 2000 not an option? I found that to be pretty stable.

 

Just boot straight into DOS, no need for either

I'd go 98se out of the 2, I wonder if you can download patches for either though?

 

do not, for the love of historical purposes ever even consider using ME.