Comment by jim180
8 hours ago
it always depended on the hardware (being stable, security is another matter).
I've got friends who ran Windows ME and it was rock solid. My experience was very very different, same with Windows 98 SE.
With that being said my PC with Win95 OSR2 was super stable.
From what I can tell, Windows Me was the most stable version of 9x for computers that were made with Windows Me in mind while older hardware with old drivers upgrading from 9x to Me was a minefield.
Windows XP forced driver development to a more modern standard that made things more stable. Still not stable enough (Windows Vista and up enforced that more and more in their APIs) but with XP the days of drivers assuming they could take complete control of the CPU and various buses were over.
Of course the companies that made shitty drivers for 9x also made shitty drivers for XP, so old hardware and hardware with shitty drivers was still less stable than other new hardware available, but things were moving forward.
These days, it's rare to see a full BSOD in Windows on any hardware but the very shittiest, especially with Windows 11 thanks to its artificial hardware support cutoff.