Forget Y2K this was the real millennium bug. Unfortunately, it could also restore files you never wanted to see again, like viruses that you’d just deleted. To its credit, Me introduced features later made popular by Windows XP, such as system restore. Shortly after Me appeared in late 2000, users reported problems installing it, getting it to run, getting it to work with other hardware or software, and getting it to stop running. Windows Millennium Edition (aka Me, or the Mistake Edition) was Microsoft’s follow-up to Windows 98 SE for home users. This might be the worst version of Windows ever released–or, at least, since the dark days of Windows 2.0. After releasing a handful of other bad Windows utilities, the company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in 1999. The FTC dubbed Syncronys’s claims “ false and misleading,” and the company was eventually forced to pull the product from the market and issue refunds. And even then, the performance boost was negligible.
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It turns out that all SoftRAM really did was expand the size of Windows’ hard disk cache–something a moderately savvy user could do without any extra software in about a minute. The 700,000 users who bought Syncronys’s SoftRAM products certainly thought so. Syncronys SoftRAM (1995)īack in 1995, when RAM cost $30 to $50 a megabyte and Windows 95 apps were demanding more and more of it, the idea of “doubling” your system memory by installing a $30 piece of software sounded mighty tempting. We appreciate the fact that there’s an alternative to Windows Media Player we just wish it were a better one.
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To be fair, RealNetworks deserves credit for offering a free media player and for hanging in there against Microsoft’s relentless onslaught. But less than a year later, Real was in hot water again for tracking the habits of its RealDownload download-management software customers.
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After a tsunami of bad publicity and a handful of lawsuits, Real issued a patch to prevent the software from tracking users’ listening habits.
Turns out that RealPlayer G2, which had been out since the previous year, also broadcast unique IDs. Smith discovered that the software was assigning a unique ID to each user and phoning home with the titles of media files played on it–while failing to disclose any of this in its privacy policy. For example, shortly after RealJukeBox appeared in 1999, security researcher Richard M. RealPlayer also had a disturbing way of making itself a little too much at home on your PC–installing itself as the default media player, taking liberties with your Windows Registry, popping up annoying “messages” that were really just advertisements, and so on.Īnd some of RealNetworks’ habits were even more troubling. A frustrating inability to play media files–due in part to constantly changing file formats–was only part of Real’s problem.
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