Windows Me gets a bad rap. Well, to be fair, it's largely deserved. The short-lived operating system crashed like there was no tomorrow. But it was also Microsoft's first consumer-oriented operating to include many features we take for granted today. Long Zheng wrote an interesting article this week listing reasons why Windows Me deserves more respect than it gets, and we were rather surprised to find that we agree with many of his points.

For example, Windows Me was the first OS to include Winows Movie Maker, System Restore, Universal Plug and Play, automatic updates, image previews in Windows Explorer, and a generic USB mass storage driver.

The problem is that Microsoft added all of these features to the Windows 98 kernel, which wasn't the most reliable basis for an operating system. It's hard not to think of Windows Me as a highly unstable operating system with a lot of shiny bells and whistles that you didn't think you needed at the time.

Sound familiar? These days a lot of folks like to complain that Windows Vista adds a lot of eye candy, but ultimately doesn't perform as well as Windows XP. But Windows Vista also features an enhanced start menu, search features, live previews of running applications, a better network manager, and a ton of security enhancements (even if some of them are a bit heavy-handed). So maybe Windows Vista is the next Windows Me, but is that necessarily a bad thing?