Windows Me

Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows ME (pronounced as an initialism, "M-E"), is a graphical operating system released on September 14, 2000 by Microsoft, and was the last operating system released in the Windows 9x series.

Windows Me was the successor to Windows 98 and was targeted specifically at home PC users. It included 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 to use for home users. Microsoft also updated the graphical user interface, shell features, and Windows Explorer in Windows Me with some of those first introduced in Windows 2000, which had been released as a business-oriented operating system seven months earlier. Windows Me could be upgraded to Internet Explorer 6 SP1 (but not to SP2 (SV1) or Internet Explorer 7), Outlook Express 6 SP1 and Windows Media Player 9 Series. Microsoft .NET Framework up to and including version 2.0 is supported, however versions 2.0 SP1, 3.x, and greater are not. Office XP was the last version of Microsoft Office to be compatible with Windows Me.

Windows Me is a continuation of the Windows 9x model, but with restricted access to real mode MS-DOS in order to speed up system boot time. This was one of the most unpopular changes in Windows Me, because applications that needed real mode DOS to run, such as older disk utilities, did not run under Windows Me (although the system could be booted into real mode DOS using a bootable Windows Me floppy disk).

Compared with other releases of Windows, Windows Me had a short shelf-life of just over a year; it was often criticised for being buggy and unstable. Windows Me was soon replaced by the Windows NT-based Windows XP, which was launched on October 25, 2001. Support for Windows Me ended on July 11, 2006.