Windows NT4 Today

[888]

wasnt there some way of getting PnP into nt4, i remember it being mentioned somewhere.

nt4 is by far the nicest version of windows to setup, the setup is sooo fast. Drivers can be an issue and so can irqs and stuff

PnP is only as good as the drivers library, so even much newer windozes have same PnP problem as nt4 without PnP.

Basically every windows in few years after its release doesn't have drivers for any newer hardware, thats why IMHO the whole "plug'n'pray" is just a smoke and mirrors

See Vista not supporting any newer devices just in about 2008...

Yes its nice to have many drivers on the OS disc, but it works only with hardware older than the OS itself obviously.

NT4 has "ISA PnP" which have to be manually installed.

(it is there:

[NT4cd]:\DRVLIB\PNPISA\X86\PNPISA.inf

right-click on inf and install)

Edited August 14, 2007 by 888

[marxo]

What is ISA PnP (ISA part)???

[888]

What is ISA PnP (ISA part)???

Works with Industry Standard Architecture (bus type) devices.

Im sure google will show plenty of results...

[RJARRRPCGP]

So, is anything bothering you? What do u think should be added or ported?

Mostly USB support and some visual enhancements (32-bit icons, gradient titlebars). Setting Tahoma as the system font would be nice too.

I don't use NT4 anymore but it was my main OS several years ago. Fast as hell for sure.

Those are just cosmetics

I'd expect some more 'serious' cons against NT4 than that

Ie lack of DX beyond DX5, lack of drivers for newer hardware, etc etc...

Other than that its just great OS, perhaps one of the best to come out from Redmond (or should I say from IBM )

Actually worse, it only supports DirectX 3!

[awergh]

officially it only support dx3 but there is dx5 for nt4 from nt5

[no1none]

officially it only support dx3 but there is dx5 for nt4 from nt5

officially NT4 doesnt support anything if we were to listen to microsoft...

DX5.0 was released for NT4 (as beta) through MSDN.

[marxo]

Officially NT4 doesn't support NT4

Windows NT4 is really one of the (if not the) fastest Windows, and I just wonder why is it abandoned this much. I mean this community has lots of (~150000 maybe less but it will eventually grow) users and you can't find more then 10 active NT4 users.

[no1none]

yes, thats sad

But as someone wrote earlier in one of the threads - the reason lies in its 'underground' treatment by Msoft itself.

How many people saw retail NT4 in the stores ever?

How many computers were sold with OEM NT4 preloaded (instead of 9x)?

See, both answers are close to none if you ask me

For some reason Msoft thought NT4 is for businesses only and general public didn't deserve smarter, more stable OS with multiuser and multilanguage support... If they had promoted NT4 in 1996 when it came out, we wouldn't have anyone in 9x forums today because 98 and later would probably have never been released...

[marxo]

Yea completely true. I didn't know about NT4 for a long time... And Microsoft is doing what is bringing more profit... We all have to realize that...

[no1none]

Yea completely true. I didn't know about NT4 for a long time... And Microsoft is doing what is bringing more profit... We all have to realize that...

youre not the only one; when i heard about "workstation" when i was teen i was like "WTF? No priviledge to install this or that? Get the f*** out of here with this sh*t"

[marxo]

"No priviledge? Priviledge? This Windows 95 is crazy, man... Wait I gotta a virus... WTF is Windows NT Security?"

But, no DX10

[888]

"No priviledge? Priviledge? This Windows 95 is crazy, man... Wait I gotta a virus... WTF is Windows NT Security?"

But, no DX10

I bet many XP users are like "what priviledge? what are they talking about?!"

(since most of home users run their XP just as Administrators... LOL)

[awergh]

xp home doesnt show the proper permission settings anyway

[xrayer]

BTW Are there some unofficial drivers for modern nVidia cards for NT4.0 SP6 like for Win9x?

With latest official forceware 77.78 my GF7600 boots in VGA mode only. I tried to force install

winxp drivers 94.xx but it failed to boot due to missing function kernel call, so drivers really are not compatible.

The last I tried was installing universal VESA VBE 3.0 driver which works in higher resolution and true colors

but it's very slow and due to crippled nvidia VBE 3.0 implementation it cannot setup higher refresh rate than 60Hz

which is a big issue on CRT...

Edited October 12, 2007 by xrayer

[no1none]

BTW Are there some unofficial drivers for modern nVidia cards for NT4.0 SP6 like for Win9x?

With latest official forceware 77.78 my GF7600 boots in VGA mode only. I tried to force install

winxp drivers 94.xx but it failed to boot due to missing function kernel call, so drivers really are not compatible.

The last I tried was installing universal VESA VBE 3.0 driver which works in higher resolution and true colors

but it's very slow and due to crippled nvidia VBE 3.0 implementation it cannot setup higher refresh rate than 60Hz

which is a big issue on CRT...

I ran asus version of last forceware for my nvidiot-based asus card when i had it, and it worked fine at 1024x768 at 75Hz (my usual default res for CRTs back then, so I remeber it well). I know what a pain for your eyes is 60 HZ, most of my office monitors used to be like that...

I remember having some problems with asus "agp driver" (the card was PCI but still required this driver for its 'internal agp acceleration' AFAIR) because latest (back then) official W2K version didnt work on NT4, but one of the previous ones actually properly installed and detected NT4. IIRC it was earlier W2K driver.

I think google search helped me back then (circa 2005) pointing to a discussion on some large videocards-related forum. Don't remember more details tho, sorry if I couldnt help more

Edited October 13, 2007 by no1none