Installing Windows NT 4.0

Product: Windows NT Workstation 4.0
From: Microsoft
For: Intel Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II and compatible CPUs (PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS versions also on the CD).
Availability: We tested the final Workstation and Server versions running Service Packs 1 through 6a (SP 4 and later versions address Y2K compliancy issues) and Option Pack 4. These Service Packs and Option Packs can be quite large. Service Pack 5, for example, was a 34.9MB cumulative upgrade patch, meaning that it included all previous patches.
Windows NT 4 was officially released to manufacturing on July 30, 1996. Version 5, (now known officially as Windows 2000 and reviewed here) was released on Feb. 17th, 2000.
Price: NT Workstation is $319, upgrades from previous versions $149; users operating the Workstation version as a server can upgrade to the Server version for $409. NT Server costs $1,129 for a new 10-user version; upgrades are $539. (Prices in US$)

Recommended configurations: Our tests of Microsoft's minimum recommended configuration, a Pentium 100 with 16MB RAM, proved inadequate for day-to-day use of Windows NT 4.0. We had better -- but still inadequate -- performance after upgrading our system's RAM to 32MB. We also tested NT4 on a Pentium Pro with 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium II with 128MB of RAM. The OS benefits more than Windows 95 does from larger RAM configurations. Windows NT also supports multiple CPU configurations and provides performance benefits from 2-way, 4-way or, on supported systems, 8-way multiprocessing.

Tip: It is easy to set a computer up to dual-boot MS-DOS and Windows 95: simply install Win95 to a different directory than the default "Windows" directory. You should install DOS/Win3.x or Windows 95 before installing Windows NT, if you wish to have multiple OSes on your system. If, before installation of NT4, you set Windows 95 to dual-boot with MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, you can have all three OSes available without any third-party software. (Later in this article, we'll mention other ways to accomplish this, too.)

Note that you have to reinstall applications you want to run under Win95 if you choose to do this. We decided we wanted to keep Win95 on our system. If we had to, we felt we could sacrifice MS-DOS and Windows 3.1, as Win95’s compatibility had proven itself to be high enough that virtually everything we wanted to run was compatible with it. So, we decided to install NT onto a different partition, and then configure the system to "dual-boot" the operating systems.

To set up the partition, we chose Partition Magic, a utility from PowerQuest that was reviewed in the July 1996 issue of TCP. Partition Magic noted that our hard disk had a "lost clusters" problem—back to DOS to run SCANDISK. Because Partition Magic cannot be run from the same partition it is affecting, we ran the DOS executable from drive A, using Windows 95’s MS-DOS mode.

After creating a 600MB partition for Windows NT, we used PM to set it to active and rebooted the computer (the PM manual advised using OS/2’s Boot Manager or System Commander to effectively manage the setting of active partitions and multiple operating systems). Then, using another computer, we ran the utility on the NT CD-ROM that created a set of three boot diskettes NT4.0 needs to start up. (Those of you lacking this luxury will have to perform this step first.) Unfortunately, one of our diskettes must have been defective, as the system halted on disk 2 with a "C_1252.NLS not found—error 4096" message. Needless to say, we were not too impressed by such an unhelpful message. But, after making another set of disks, we managed to get past this error and soon arrived at the Setup page, which vaguely resembles the text-based setup page that DOS or Windows 3.1 users are undoubtedly familiar with.

Unfortunately, after pressing ENTER to continue, the machine froze again a few minutes later, during its detection of our hardware configuration. Our system had an Adaptec SCSI adapter (controlling a CD-ROM drive), which we had to tell the system to ignore. After restarting with the floppies again and configuring the Adaptec card manually, were able to move to the next step.

Installing from the CD-ROM Windows NT then presented us with a list of hardware settings similar to those seen during an MS-DOS installation ("the above list matches my configuration"), and then prompted us to insert the CD-ROM. From there, the system presented us with several choices, including the option to convert the FAT partition to NTFS, reformat it, delete it, create a new partition, or install the operating system (OS) onto a partition. We chose the latter option and away it went. In approximately 15 minutes, the system had finished installing files onto the hard drive and presented us with a series of screens that will be familiar to anyone who has installed Windows 95.

A choice of Typical, Portable, Compact or Custom installations. (We chose Custom.)
A choice of software options to add via a "Select Components" screen. NT 4.0 comes with versions of all the games bundled with Win95, including the excellent Pinball game. It installs QuickView as a standard component, unlike Win95, which leaves this useful component out by default.
NT 4.0 also installs an Internet Jumpstart kit (including Internet Explorer 2.0), multimedia, and Exchange components virtually identical to those found in Windows 95.
And, as evidence of what all the best programmers are working on, an amazing array of very cool screen savers (many of which exploit the system’s OpenGL 3-D renderer).

In addition to OpenGL, NT 4.0 also includes limited support for the DirectX API (application programming interface), which is supported by a growing number of Windows 95 entertainment and multimedia titles. DirectX, which permits high-speed graphics and high-performance audio, was apparently designed to facilitate high-performance games (for example, the Windows 95 version of Looking Glass Software’s excellent Flight Unlimited flight simulator is DirectX-based), but is now being deployed in other areas as well, including some of Microsoft’s Internet- and multimedia-related products. It remains to be seen how—or if—Microsoft will integrate DirectX and OpenGL. At any rate, with its ActiveX support and compatibility with many of the Windows 95 APIs, NT 4.0 can run many software applications designed for Windows 95, and future 32-bit titles are likely to support both OSes.

NT supports two monitors when connected to two identical graphics cards from the same manufacturer in many cases. Check with the graphics card supplier. Matrox and ATI would be a good place to start, as both are leading manufacturers with robust NT support. NT 5 (Windows 2000) will improve on this capability to support cards from two or more different vendors. Windows 98 already supports this multivendor feature.

Plug and Pray
We installed the system from start to finish in less than one hour—not bad, although it certainly wasn’t smooth sailing. Because NT doesn’t perform the kind of Plug and Play hardware detection that Windows 95 does, it didn’t detect the fact that we had a Microsoft Sound system sound card installed. However, by going into the Multimedia control panel and clicking the ADD... button, we were able to install support for this card in next to no time.

Tip: It is particularly easy to determine hardware settings on a system already running Windows 95. From information supplied in Win95’s System Control Panel, we simply wrote down the pertinent IRQ and address information for our sound and network cards, booted NT and entered the same values.

Good plan, except...
NT successfully detected our system’s NE2000-compatible Ethernet card during its Workstation setup phase. Unfortunately, our card was set up at IRQ 12—a value that worked correctly under both Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Windows 95, yet Windows NT wouldn’t even let us choose IRQ 12 from its list of available IRQs. Presumably, the system was using IRQ 12 for some other purpose. Needless to say, our system’s network-configuration process didn’t go smoothly. NT fared better with our system’s Miro (S3-based) video card. In fact, NT’s video-configuration options are more extensive and better implemented than those in Windows 95. We were able to choose from multiple referesh rates and resolutions, test our settings before committing to them, and the system did not require a restart to change settings. (An unsupported Microsoft utility called QuickRes, available from the company’s Web site, provides similar capabilities in Windows 95.) It is important to understand that NT cannot use DOS-type drivers for hardware.

Because of NT’s hardware-abstraction layer and secure-system design, it doesn’t let software talk directly to the hardware. You must use hardware supported by NT, or it simply won’t work. You'll find an extensive list of supported hardware at the NTcompatible.com Web site. Another good list of NT 4.0-compatible hardware and driver updates is at http://www.conitech.com/windows

We were able to boot Windows NT and, from there, we could manually set the active partition using NT’s Disk Administrator tool, then reboot with the MS-DOS/Windows/Windows95 partition set as the active partition. We had wanted to keep our existing DOS and Windows installation as "compatibility insurance." The only trouble was, because Partition Magic didn’t run under Win95, it necessitated booting back to MS-DOS mode, changing directories, running the PQMAGIC program (the fact that the mouse was disabled because we hadn’t loaded a real-mode mouse driver didn’t help either), setting the NT partition as active, and restarting again. It all seemed like too much work.

And, besides, the NT documentation suggested that this rigmarole wasn’t necessary. It implied that we should be able to simply choose one or the other OS from a boot menu at start-up time, and it would take care of the boot management. There was a boot menu, but it simply listed the options (approximately) as follows: 1) Windows NT 2) Windows NT (VGA mode) 3) Unknown operating system on drive C: With a boot menu name like Number 3, we weren’t surprised that the dual-boot switch back to Windows 95 didn’t work. We fiddled a bit with the BOOT.INI file, but it was to no avail.

The idea of a convenient boot menu at startup time sounded appealing, so, despite the fact that we had a working NT system, we went back to the installer disks and tried a different tactic. This time, we surmised that running Windows NT Setup directly from Windows 95 would be more likely to make the NT installer realize that there was another OS available for dual-booting.

To make a long story short . . . it worked perfectly, although things were looking pretty shaky during the install process. Here’s what we did, and what came of it:

Booted Win95 (presumably, this process would work from Windows 3.x, too)
Ran NT Setup from the CD-ROM
It hung at the same point it hung in the original installation (i.e., at the hardware detect phase). As before, we rebooted and told it to ignore the hardware.
We manually installed the driver for our Adaptec 154x SCSI adapter. The system proceeded to copy about 80 MB of temp files onto our C drive, in preparation for the reinstall.
For unknown reasons, the system hung again at the initial NT boot screen. Resisting the urge to chuck the CD out the nearest window, we booted from the SETUP floppies again and chose REPAIR, thinking that perhaps we could salvage either the original or this second installation. We inserted the Repair diskette and the tool diagnosed our system settings and made some changes (we didn’t specify anything in particular—we just let it do its job). When the system rebooted, we had a moment of joy when the hoped-for Boot menu appeared, and actually contained an entry corresponding to our working version of Windows 95. (We tried it—it worked!) So it seemed we were halfway there.
In fact, we were a lot closer than we thought. Shutting down Win95 and rebooting, we were delighted to discover that NT also worked fine! Because we had chosen to install NT onto a FAT partition, we could see both C and D drives from both Windows 95 and NT. Only one apparent problem remained: our old MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 boot option seemed to have vanished. We checked the MSDOS.SYS file for the required BOOT=MULTI entry. It was there. Almost resigned to deleting the DOS and Win31 directories from the drive, we rebooted Windows 95 to test the F8 "Boot options." Lo, there was "Boot previous version of MS-DOS"... and it worked! All we had to do was hack the new IRQ value for our network card into PROTOCOL.INI, and Windows 3.1 came up like a champ, too. A happy ending, it would seem.

Nixed network
Because NT uses a so-called Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL), the manuals and help files are remarkably free of references to IRQs and the other hardware-oriented bugaboos of IBM-compatible PCs. Moreover, because HAL insisted on using IRQ 12 for something or other, there was no way to change the IRQ to 12, as our network card setting required. It was only after we ran Windows NT Diagnostics that we could see what IRQs the various devices in the system were using—and even then, only after we selected an option to "include HAL resources." (Windows NT Diagnostics is roughly analogous to the MSD utility that DOS and Windows users often rely upon for system sleuthing purposes).

Fortunately, the problem was easy to solve. Using the configuration utility included with our network card (an EtherPro III Plus), we simply set the IRQ to a value the was available to NT, rebooted and configured the network card from the Network control panel. Similarly, our audio card was not detected by the system’s setup process and, because NT does not support Plug and Play as Windows 95 does, we had to manually configure the drivers for the card.

Performance
Okay, so it’s all working. Was it worth it? Windows NT has not crashed (or misbehaved) once on our test system. Performance on our 16MB test system is comparable to that of Windows 95 when accessing small apps or the GUI, although NT4 showed serious performance degradation on our 16 MB test system when we bogged it down with large apps or more processes than would fit in available RAM. (According to Microsoft, users with 16 MB RAM will notice a slight decline in performance compared to Windows 95, while NT users with 32 MB RAM or more will see "significant" improvements over the performance of Win95, due to NT's more sophisticated multitasking model.)

On a system with 24 MB RAM or more, you may expect NT to perform well, but clearly, 16 MB of RAM is inadequate for all but the most basic applications. Fortunately, with the current low price of RAM (16 MB is running about $200 at this writing), having this much memory is no longer an impracticality for serious PC users.

On our 16 MB test platform, we were dismayed to note that the GUI shell was effectively tied up when copying a file, and that, when switching from Netscape to the Paint accessory (to paste a screen shot for this article), the system was completely unresponsive for several seconds, while the virtual memory swap file was busy. In fact, running Netscape 3.0b5a and Paint effectively brought our 16 MB test machine to its knees. Paint complained about not having enough memory to complete operations, and the performance monitor showed that Netscape was effectively hogging 100 percent of the CPU every time a link was accessed. (For comparison, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 3.0 for Windows NT used 25 to 45 percent of the CPU in similar situations.)

NT CPU utilization tests:

Navigator 3.0 (click on HTML link): 100%
Navigator 3.0 (idle on Netscape’s home page): 5%
Internet Exp. 3.0 (click on link): 25-45%
Internet Exp. 3.0 (idle on Netscape’s home page): 1%
IE 3.0 idle on Microsoft’s Internet Exp. page: 10%
IE 3.0 idle on Microsoft’s IE Java home page (page has embedded AVI): 1%

Testing the same apps under Windows 95 produced these results:

Navigator 3.0b5 (click on link): 100%
Navigator 3.0b5 (idle on Netscape’s home page): 100% (oink!)
Internet Exp. 3.0 (click on link): 25-45%
Internet Exp. (idle on Netscape’s home page): 2%
IE idle on Microsoft’s Internet Exp. page: 22%
IE idle on Microsoft’s IE Java home page (page has embedded AVI): 100%

Other CPU utilization tests produced some interesting results:

NT: Photoshop 3.0.5, a 32-bit, multithreaded application showed 92% CPU utilization during an Unsharp Mask operation.
Windows 95: Performing the same Unsharp Mask operation on the same machine showed a 60%-70% CPU utilization during multiple tests.
NT: Converting from RGB to CMYK spiked the meter to 95% while the separation tables were being built, then climbed to 100% during the conversion.
Windows 95: System Monitor showed CPU use at 91% during the building of separation tables, spiking to 100% during conversion.
NT: The FrontPage 1.1 server used so little CPU time that it barely registered on the graph. (When a remote user accessed the FrontPage server running on NT, CPU utilization never exceeded 15%, and the graph showed less than 1% utilization when idle.)
Win95: same.

Windows NT is designed to support more than one CPU—if the application is programmed to take advantage of this capability. Hence, if you had a multithreaded application such as Adobe Photoshop and a system with, say, two Pentium Pro CPUs, NT would automatically share the demands of the application between both processors.

Because Netscape Navigator is, ahem, not known as one of the most stable applications in existence, it provided us with an opportunity to test NT’s Crash Protection. When an application crashes, Windows NT brings up a diagnostic tool called Dr. Watson that creates an application error log to help diagnose the problem, and allows the offending process to be gracefully shut down. This worked like a charm, and the rest of our programs continued without interruption.

Conclusion
We think Windows 95 is a better choice for the average home user, with its superior Plug and Play functionality, lesser hardware requirements and greater compatibility with 16-bit DOS and Windows applications. But, for business users who want a truly robust computing environment, NT is a great choice. We won’t be dual-booting often.

PoiNTs of iNTerest
Thinking of upgrading to Windows 95 or NT? The manual for V Communications Inc.’s System Commander has a tip that could come in very handy for users of that product or PowerQuest’s PartitionMagic.

Make a new partition using System Commander or Partition Magic (non-destructive partitioning utils); set up dual-boot using either of these utils, or another boot manager).
Xcopy DOS and Windows 3.x files to the new partition
install Windows 95 or NT
No need to reinstall apps! All existing apps now work with both operating systems.
In addition to the Performance monitor discussed earlier, NT has a set of performance gauges accessible by right-clicking the task bar and selecting the Performance tab. Alternately, they may be accessed by pressing CTRL-ALT-Delete and choosing Task Manager:Performance.
Windows NT has the ability to automatically reboot after a system failure. Choose "automatically reboot" in the System control panel’s Startup/Shutdown tab (also accessible by holding alt and double-clicking the My computer icon).
NT does not allow programs such as disk editors to directly access the hard disk. Thus, Partition Magic would not run, and presented a message "the application has attempted to directly access the hard disk, which can not be supported."
Virtually all interface shortcuts and tricks published for Windows 95 work similarly on NT 4.0.
It is definitely worth perusing the Help file.

Other tips:
NT 4 Service Packs are available in a number of forms, including a downloadable version from www.microsoft.com and on various CDs, such as the Internet Explorer disc. Service Pack 3 is typically required to use a number of newer products, such as the full-duplex sound drivers from Creative Labs, and many other audio and multimedia products.

Service Pack 6a, released in Oct., 1999, is recommended, as well as the latest hotfixes for recently noted security glitches. NTBugTraq has a query engine that can help you keep Windows NT fixes up to date.

We had some difficulty in getting the SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold drivers to work under NT, even when carefully following Creative Labs' detailed instructions. As it turned out, their README file didn't clearly explain that the file called DEVUPD.INF is placed in a directory you specify; it is not in the location the README file suggests, nor is there any error message to tell you what might be wrong.

If, for example, you unzip the drivers from AWENT.EXE into C:\AWENT, the correct command to access the Service Pack New Device Driver Installer on a CD in drive E: would be:

E:\en\nt4sp3\i386\DEVPRE C:\awent\DEVUPD.INF

NT on a portable? CardWizard 4.0, a US$79 add-on for Window NT from SystemSoft (www.systemsoft.com) adds hot-swappable PC Card support and better power management to NT's PCMCIA support options.

Security issues:
There are a number of exploits that can be used to compromise the security of an NT-based network. For example, a cracking tool called L0phtCrack can recover passwords directly from the registry, from the file system and backup tapes, from repair disks, or by recovering the passwords as they traverse the network.
A program called getadmin.exe originating from Russia demonstrates an ability to add users to the Administrators group. This exploit is addressed by a HOTFIX -- A README file and KB article provide more details. Note, however, that a new variation of this exploit still works even after installing the hotfix! See our feature on NT Security for more details.

These are only two of many risks facing NT administrators. For up-to-date info on this topic, we recommend subscribing to an NT security mailing list or bookmarking a site such as SecurityFocus.com to stay up to date.

For Further Reading:

Windows2000 Server
NT Security
Ars-technica.com: Life After SP4
Salon: Mindcraft: The final chapter - NT outperforms Linux on every test at a rematch of the operating system trials.

IT Library

The Techno Zone

User Account

Installing Windows NT 4.0

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