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Resurrecting NT4 in 2016


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Hi Gang,

I was recommended to post here, from another tech site, as my questions are NT4 related. For fun, I picked up an old laptop, a Dell Latitude D610 and installed  NT 4.0 (workstation) on it. Got all drivers (plus USB) working fine, except the wireless card, and as near as I can tell, no drivers existed for that card that are older than Win2k.

My problem comes in, that although I have Shell32,dll at version 4.72.something, I cannot get any browser better than IE 6.0 installed. Note, that's IE 6.0 no updates. Here's where I run into issues:

(1) Any links to all the SPs and other fixes for IE6?

(2) I have SP6a on the laptop, but I know there are tons more hotfixes out there. Rather than trying to install them 1 by 1, is there a more elegant method?

Finally, VLC. Completely goes stupid with version 1.0.5, will install, won't run, throws a long error message missing somethingGDIsomething I think.

Any solution for A/V streaming with modern formats?

Thank you kindly for your help

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The wireless card likely isn't working because 1) the Intel 2200 with the D610 is too new- you need the 2100 which has NT 4.0 driver support. You may find it on eBay (http://www.ebay.com/sch/Internal-Network-Cards/20318/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=intel+2100)

My ThinkPad T40 had the same network card, the drivers for NT 4.0 are here: http://sdfox7.com/ibm/t40/t40_nt40/wireless/inwi1tnt.exe

You also need PCMCIA support. NT 4.0 has rudimentary support for PCMCIA. You will want to install CardWare (http://sdfox7.com/nt40/CARDWARE.ZIP). When you install, select "Unknown PCIC laptop". 

After installing the wireless driver, you need to install TCP/IP networking. This must be done after installing the card driver because networking will be looking for the card to configure it. Here is a good article from 1997 explaining the networking process on NT 4.0: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles-tutorials/windows-nt/nt4netin.html

For Internet Explorer 6.0 Service Pack 1 for NT 4.0, I have it here: http://sdfox7.com/ie/win32/IE6SP1NT.ZIP

I had some old notes here for setting up NT 4.0 on an old Gateway Solo 9300: http://sdfox7.com/solo9300/winnt/wifi.txt

You'll want to install the "updated" common controls (50COMUPD.EXE) and libraries update (SPEU.EXE). Both of these are nearly 20 years old but you'll still need them for the wireless configuration operation.

Once you install IE6, you will find it too old and useless. I would install Firefox. More info here, I wrote it for Windows 95, but the same info applies to NT 4.0: How to run Mozilla Firefox 2.0 on Windows 95

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6 minutes ago, JodyT said:

How did the OP get USB working?  Was it just for mouse support, and has that been added by someone experimentally?

Would Firefox 2x be just as cumbersome to use as Internet Explorer 6?

:)

http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/usb.htm

Firefox 2.x is still a bit more useful than IE 6, the final 2.0.0.20 release is 7 years newer.

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Yes the USB (I used the dell drivers) works great for printers, mice, keyboards, USB sticks, hard drives, etc.

There is also a cool little program called "Invisible 1.4" that makes the background invisible so your icons are more like those in XP/7, which was designed for 95/98 but works fine on NT 4.0

I was hoping for a version of Opera, but FF will do if I must, anything is better than IE though it's quite funny, IE 6.0 is so old that none of the ads that litter the web will display properly.

(EDIT) Thank you SDFOX for those links and software, much appreciated!

Edited by AttackDonut
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11 hours ago, sdfox7 said:

http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/usb.htm

Firefox 2.x is still a bit more useful than IE 6, the final 2.0.0.20 release is 7 years newer.

If your CPU has SSE(for NT4, you'll need a SSE kernel driver as well http://x.rths.cf/nt4sse.zip), you can use my QtWeb NT4 port.

https://code.google.com/archive/p/qtweb/issues/182#c2

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Opera works well, the SSE additions I must have installed already before. Still struggling with video playback from my NAS. VLC throws errors upon running (installs fine though, version 1.0.5) and WinAMP 2.95 gives only audio from a movie, no video

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Looong shot (and not really-really a video player) but what happens with VrtualDub?

http://www.virtualdub.org/

More ideas (Real Player 8 shouldn't be too shabby :unsure:):
http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/media.htm

As per the above the only working VLC version (latest) is 0.8.6h.

http://filehippo.com/it/download_vlc_media_player/4246/
 

jaclaz


 

Edited by jaclaz
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55 minutes ago, jaclaz said:

Looong shot (and not really-really a video player) but what happens with VrtualDub?

http://www.virtualdub.org/

More ideas (Real Player 8 shouldn't be too shabby :unsure:):
http://nt4ref.zcm.com.au/media.htm

As per the above the only working VLC version (latest) is 0.8.6h.

http://filehippo.com/it/download_vlc_media_player/4246/
 

jaclaz


 

I forgot to address your VLC issues in my post. In my own experience, VLC 0.8.6a through 0.8.6d were the only versions I could get working trouble free on Windows 95 and NT 4.0. The newer 0.8.6x versions gave me problems (e through h).

A major problem with NT 4.0 is that there are no newer versions of DirectX versions available unless you resort to unofficial versions. This may be causing you problems that I never experienced with Windows 95.

Windows 95 supported USB (to a degree) and DirectX all the way to version 8 (DX80ENG.EXE). It also supported the latest versions of Windows Media Player, and AOL, 7.0 (SETUP9X.EXE), at a time when AOL ruled the world. These, among other reasons, made it a more desirable system for home users, even if it was a little less stable than NT.

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I'm going to build on what was already said here. While I applaud your efforts of trying to use Windows NT 4.0 in this day in age, there are so many limitations that make is almost undesirable to use. My biggest problem with it is the fact that DirectX isn't very uptodate on it at all. I know at one point someone ported DirectX 5 to it but that's still quite old and not very useful. The fact that it also can't use any real modern browser is also quite a pain. If there was more interest in using NT, it probably wouldn't be that much harder to create a KernelEx for it like BWC has done for Windows 2000. But like I said, I'm sure the reason nobody has done this is because not many people seem interested in using NT4 for much anymore which actually is sad because the OS is pretty rock solid. But in this stage of the game, I guess it really comes down to what you want to do with this machine. If it's just to play with/experiment, just go for it and see what you can come up with. But mostly NT4 is really only useful for playing music, possibly watching older/common format videos. NT4 wasn't designed to be a gaming machine which is why DirectX is pretty much absent and I'm assuming business applications weren't so reliant on DirectX like they can be these days.

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To use a newer(ish) version of VLC view the following topic and scroll down to the very last post on page 3. I recommend version 0.9.8a.

And All versions of Flash 9 work, including the latest 9.0.289. just open the npswf32.dll file (should be in the opera plugins folder once you install it) in a hex editor, and overwrite the function "MonitorFromWindow" with "GetAppCompatFlags". Then save the file, and replace it inside your opera plugins folder.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.3 works, and to install it view the link below. I'm pretty sure that only one hex edit has to be done though, the one in vcl680mi.dll if I remember correctly. I could be wrong though as it has been a while since I last used Windows NT.

http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb.html

You can use Java 5 (Up to 1.5.0.09 - view link below)

http://toastytech.com/guis/miscb2.html

From what I know Twister AV still supports Windows NT4. Don't quote me on that,  though, the latest version may not work, you could just google search Twister Antivirus.

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Well VLC, the .86h version, works quite well. Doesn't like some of the 1080p .mkvs I have, but that might be a CPU limitation more than anything else. The current version of AdMuncher works great, so browsing the web is now mostly painless. Certain websites don't render right, but it's not as bad as using IE6.

Thank you all for your help in getting this experiment up and running. Some seriously valuable advice you have given me.

Cheers!

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