As a whole most recent apps which have been released by most major firms are OK.
To Ascertain whether your programme will work with NT 4.0 you should consider the following points.
In theory if a program is Windows 95 certified it should run under NT4.0 BUT Microsft has been somewhat lax in its certification process so that some very common programmes DO NOT Work. Eg.
Fear and intrepidation plagued me in the days leading up to the install, (probably be good to expect the worst) I couldn't get the installer that comes with the Beta Windows 95 interface to work so I went through the DOS version. I built the 3 boot disks and and watched it install with the same installer as the Windows 95 installer so I thought gee not bad..... Then to my amazement it configured the Zip Drive SCSI and my NEC CD-Rom Drive, the Matrox Millenium card and without a flaw rebooted and proceeded to load Windows NT 4.0 FASTER than Windows95!!!
I did however screw up the setting for the ISA SMC Elite 16 Network card though, but when this was installed with appropropriate setting it worked fine. The Windows 95 machine was recognised and all is pretty well. I have to still do some mucking about with the other end but as whole it worked great. Total time taken 20-30 mins.
As a whole the experience has been very pleaseant Netscape (Gold 3.0) still shits itself (almost regularly timed perhaps?) but not so often and the Browse function within it works consistantly whereas in Windows 95 it did not. Other apps worked fine as well and speed that I noticed was almost no different to Windows 95. Paint Shop Pro ran at about 100% but I will do some tests to confirm this. The menus & stuff seemed a touch sluggish but TweakUI soon fixed that! My conclusion DO IT!!!!
Please send me your experiences - Please make the subject read MYWINT 4
Bob Trotman's Experiences - NT4.0
Hi. I have ZERO experience with NT anyway but I took a chance with Win NT V4.0 beta 2. First, since I had a Gateway2000 with a bastard-ized Matrox Millenium video card, there were all sorts of video problems. Once I got it to 800x600x256, the video seemed to work "ok".
As for 32-bit programs, it is MUCH faster than Win95 in every respect.
Again, since I know very little about NT and networking, permissions, etc its been tough going in that department. But it's still on my hard drive at work and will stay there until the release-version comes out.
I will not install it at home 'cause I love my DOS games and I don't want to mess with those!
Editors Comment: Bob shouldn't be concerned about the prospect of having NT4.0 on his machine at home, it will quite happily install into a ms-dos directory on his hard-disk or another partition and from there it will quite happily co-exist with Win95.
Michael Klinteberg Experiences - NT4.0
I have used the OLD WinNT 3.51 for 8 month. And never NEVER N E V E R did the computer crash, hang, lockup. I have used WinNT 4 for one month (Beta) and Dr Watson crashes everytime I shutdown. But still, the computer continue. One (out of a few) good things is the program that delete/create's partions and format disks. This is G R E A T. When done, it saves the changes to disk and Quit ( not NT, just the program ). You don't have to reboot for the changes to take effect.
....... I can add some more failings of NT4.0 if you want: I forgot one of the biggest problems with the machine. No decent scripting language. After having Applescript on the Mac, Perl under Unix and REXX under OS/2, I'm totally aghast that MS can't manage to ship anything at all. (Yes, I know you can get perl and REXX for NT, but why should I have to? Even so, neither is integrated the way that Applescript is.)
Not having commands to "Close current folder, open subfolder", "Open parent folder" and "Close all folders" (albeit it does iconize all) is a major pain. Why is Apple the only one to get this right?
Why when I ask for properties of the Start Menu am I only able to alter part of it? If I want to reconfigure the groups below the line, I have to use a whole different method.
Dismal background multitasking when set to max foreground, and the settings are too coarse. Better than the coorperative on a Mac, but compared to nice on a Unix box it's pretty sad.
The CD player keeps losing track of the fact it has a music disc after it finishes playing- I have to eject and reinsert. (ok, ok, this is petty and not really a fault of the OS...)
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Windows NT 4 (WinNT-L) FAQ COPYRIGHT © 1996 by Hans Klarenbeek
All Rights Reserved by the author, Hans Klarenbeek
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