It came without service pack, after SP1 everything got worse and the less we talk about how the SP2 worked with my old lap, the better
The performance of the OS improved a bit but still took a while to boot the OS (2 minutes or so).
I don't want to flame but for a good windows edition since Windows 98SE the next becomes a catastrophe:
- Win 98SE good
- Win ME bad
- Win XP good
- Win Vista bad
- Win 7 good
- Win 8 ...
add windows 95 = good
windows 98 (first edition) = bad
to that list too. (it is a bit of a pattern).
window 3.11 was pretty good too. so there wasn't always a pattern.
We can extend that with the following criticisms too.
NT3.5 = bad
windows NT4 = good
windows 2000 = bad.
actually windows 2000 was great at what it did well.
But.
after windows 95, then windows 98 and windows 98SE did so well someone at MS realised that people seemed to love editions of windows named after years.
windows NT3 and windows NT4 were technically better than either 95 or 98, but home users believed that they were for business and hardly anybody used those OS's at home.
Windows NT5, was therefore renamed windows 2000 as an attempt to get home users to buy it.
and the last DOS based OS was not called windows 2000 (as it should have been to continue the 95 - 98 trend.) but was instead set-up to fail by calling it windows ME.
because Microsoft knew that people liked the year naming scheme.
windows 2000 was a business OS, it wasn't well suited to the home environment, if you list it alongside 95 and 98 it sucked. it didn't cope well with games, or joy sticks, or obscure TV tuner cards, or video cards, or weird MIDI cards, or weird sound cards, or anything else that home users really wanted to use
if you put it next to NT3 and NT4 it was pretty good. -especially in a work environment.
Windows ME sucked, but it's pretty important to realise a big part of the reason it sucked is it was set-up to fail because Microsoft knew it was abandoning the DOS kernel before ME was even released. -which explains why support not only sucked but was short lived from MS, it explains why third parties couldn't be bothered to write drivers. the DOS memory management (or lack thereof) explained why blue screens appeared so frequently.
