| Reason for running NT Workstation | Your response should be |
| Company policy | Quit and hire on with a company who will be in business on a longer term basis. |
| I like it | Seek help from the closest mental health facility. |
| I have a dual processor motherboard | The only good reason I can think of. |
| Finding drivers for Windows NT | |
|---|---|
| Paper Bits | Provides tips for finding Windows NT Driver downloads on the Internet. Browse the extensive collection of links. |
| Windows NT Software Links | Some additional links |
| World of Windows Networking | Excellent section of NT networking including Novell |
| Windows NT Workstation 4.0 | You will be spending a lot of time at the Microsoft site. Good luck ! |
| WinNT DownLoads | Some M$ downloads including Explorer for WinNT. Also have service Packs and Power Toys. |
| Discussion Forum | Some installation help and other pointers. |
| NT Workstation Site | This site is no longer being maintained |
| Microsoft Hardware Quality Labs | A few good links here |
| The Unofficial NT Hack FAQ | FAQ and additional information. Also has useful hacks & cracks. |
| JSI Inc. | Windows NT ® Tips |
| Dogpile Search | DogPile search for NT drivers |
| Certification and Study Guides | |
|---|---|
| Workstation Study Notes | Step by step installation procedure and a lot more |
| Certsites | Windows NT Workstation is an excellent place to start your certification quest. |
| Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Easy Installation | |
|---|---|
| Boot from CD ROM | Change your ROM BIOS to allow booting from CD ROM.
Insert your Windows NT Workstation CD in the drive.
Be sure you have enough room to install.
After installation set your ROM-BIOS to boot from the C: drive.
I installed on my F: drive which is the 4th logical partition of my first hard drive. This is a 1 GByte partition. I have Windows 95c installed on C: which is the 1st logical partition of hard drive number one. Windows NT will build a dual boot in the master control block of C: This will allow dual booting your system. With NT's boot control tool Windows 95 may be set as the default boot option. |
| Exhaustive Disk Check | I skipped this. Only the partition in which you install will be checked. |
| File System | I left the file system as FAT16. This will preserve compatibility with Windows 95. On my system I have 20 GByte of disk space. Preserving an inefficient file system on less endowed systems may present a problem. |
| Networking | I only want to connect to a local LAN.
I used an IP address of 192.168.001.001
This address is by convention reserved for micro-LANs.
Add the NetBEUI Protocol so that NT will see your connected Win95 systems. |
| Account Setup | I created only one account. That account is the administrator account. This allows me full control of all the system assets. Other accounts may be created later. |
| Video | My drivers were on the NT CD ROM.
Windows NT found my Video card and allowed me to set it to true color at 800 by 600.
If Windows NT does not find your video card set up as a simple VGA system. Using the Control Panel the correct drivers for your video card can be set later. There is provision for adding from floppy. |
| Audio | I have a Sound Blaster AWE64 sound card. This is a plug and play device. The initial installation did not find this card. This problem is fixed after Service Pack installation. |
| Dial Up Networking | This is not as straightforward as with Win95.
Create a shortcut to the desktop and right click then use Properties to set your Internet Service Provider's DNS IP address. |
| Service Packs | My CD came with Service Pack 3.
Install by putting the CD in the drive and typing <cd-drive>:\ntsp3 in the run box.
Note: Service packs contain all the previous code. Which is to say SP5 contains all the 'stuff' from SP3 & SP4. Audio After installing the service pack place the NT CD in your CD drive. Right click on <cd:>drvlib\pnpisa\x86\pnpisa.ini and select 'install' from the pop menu. Then restart your system. |
| Safe Mode | Yes there is a safe mode to Windows NT. Its called Windows NT 4.0 Workstation [VGA] Select this from the dual boot choice menu when presented on boot up. You can then select 'last known good' if you are having major problems. |
| Editing the Choices | A system that has both NT and Windows 95 installed boots a choice menu. This choice menu is in a read only file called 'c:\boot.ini' Change this file to a read/write file. Edit the file and you can change the order of execution or the timer. Save your changes. Then make this file a read only file again. |
| Programs That Work | Note: If you have not created a Download folder do so.
Such a folder can save you hours of time.
WinZip was the first program I installed from Downs95. Many of my downloads are in this format. NT comes with Microsoft Internet Explorer 2.0. I next thing I did was to load Netscape 4.5 from my Downs95 folder. I then installed ICQ99a and registered my old account number. I imported all of my Win95 ICQ information using QCI2000. The next package I installed was ACDsee. The last package I installed was HomeSite 3.0. |
| Programs That Don't Work | Net Timer Pro - I had to download the newer version NTP 3.3.1.
There are now two timers running so to calculate total connect time I must sum them.
AOL 4.0 - Connects to the service but never completes the AOL network connection. The 'fine' folks at AOL say there is no fix for this. |
| Microsoft Programs | Microsoft Office 97 installs and works fine. Microsoft FrontPage also installs and works fine. About Microsoft Internet Explorer ... the less said the better! Microsoft Internet Explorer for NT must be downloaded from Microsoft. |
| Backing Up | I used Ghost to backup the 4th partition (drive F:) to my K: drive. Note: Windows NT will not let you do a backup from the DOS box. Fix: Create a DOS bootable floppy. Boot from that floppy. Then run the backup. |
| Windows NT Workstation 4.0 Comments | |
|---|---|
| Pros: | NT is a stronger alternative to Windowing than Windows 98. NT does support dual processor systems. NT is easier to install and run than Linux. NT can use many of the same software packages that have been written for Win95/98. NT user interface is almost identical to Win95/98. NT shortcuts from the desktop are available. NT has a Task Manager that is much stronger than Win95's. |
| Cons: | NT is not for the faint of heart. NT security is much more complete than Win95/98. See comments on backing up. NT does use more system resources than does Win95/98. But dual CPU support makes more CPU resources available. NT has fewer hardware drivers available than Win95/98. NT's native file system (NTFS) if used makes using such partitions with Win95/98 difficult to impossible. NT's shortcuts do not allow keystroke combinations for the dialer. |
| Differences: | Dr. Computer International |
| Making Windows NT Work Better | |
|---|---|
| Move your Paging File | NT puts its paging file in the same partition as NT.
Use Disk Administrator to locate a suitable location for the swap file.
I had an unused (left over) area on my 3rd hard drive.
Format this area with the same file system that NT is using. Then using the Control Panel | System | Performance Tab and change button to move paging file. Set the initial size to the recommended size and maximum size to 50 MByte larger. Press the set button. Don't forget to remove the old paging file. |
| Run Away Processes | NT has a Task Manager that helps here.
Right click in a blank area of the Start bar or press Ctrl+Alt+Del. Select Task Manager... from the pop-menu. The Task Manager will let you look at the processes you have running. If you have no runaways the System Idle Process should be using 94% to 99% of your processor. The Name, PID, CPU, CPU Time, and Mem Usage buttons above those columns can be used to sort on that item. Runaway processes can be highlighted and stopped. You may set the task priority from this screen as well. |
| boot.ini | NT uses a file in the root directory of C: to establish the startup menu.
This is the black and white menu you see when your NT/Win95 system is booted.
To change the file do the following: Use My Computer to find the file. Turn the read only flag off. Edit the file with Notepad, and make the changes you want. Save the file and again make it a read only file. Alternately do: Start > Settings > Control Panel > System > Startup/Shutdown tab and make changes there. |