NT 4 on old hardware

[reidsolberg]

I'm planning on running NT4 Workstation (SP6a, IE 6, Windows Desktop Upgrade) on a 486DX2/66MHz box with 32MB ram, 2x 500MB IDE hard drives, 3 1/2" and 5 1/4" floppies, 32x IDE CD-Rom, 2MB Ati Mach 64 ISA graphics, ISA sound card, 28.8 ISA modem, and possibly an ISA NIC. My primary concern is the compatibility of the graphics card, which I'm looking into, as well as the sound card. If I can't find NT 4 drivers, can I use NT 3.x drivers? I realize I can't justifiably use Win 3.x, 9x drivers because of their extensive use of Dos. Does anyone know how fast NT 4 will run on this system in comparison with 95 and 98?

 

[wolluf]

I would imagine it will hardly run at all - I remember having serious performance problems with a P266 running NT4 with 32MB RAM about 5 years ago (it was the 32MB RAM - too little for reasonable performance - needed at least 64) - though I've never run NT4 on such an old processor (the desktop update also reduces performance).
I think some devices will work with NT 3.x drivers (probably a case of try it and see if the need arises).

PS Windows 95 would be a much better bet, performancewise on such a machine, IMHO.

 

[johncurtis]

Eeks, I wouldn't try this. We've had NT 'running' on 133Mhz PCs with 32MB RAM but they were so slow as to be virtually unusable. The minimum spec we've had NT running usably (is that a word?) is 233MHz with 64MB RAM.
As Wolluf says you'd be much better off with Windows 95 (or 3.1!)

John

 

[lifto]

It seems to me that the "official" minimum specs, according to Microsoft were 486 -25mhz, 16 megs of ram and about 120 megs of free disk space so it should run but my question is......

WHY BOTHER? You won't have a usable workstations by todays standards.

 

[reidsolberg]

I worked at a pet store for some time and the owner ran Windows 98 SE on a 486SX 33 with 14MB ram as the cash/POS system. Needless to say, I have a very high tolerance of slow system setups. For what he needed, he'd have been much better of running DR-Dos and possibly Windows 3.x.

NT 4 with 32MB and a DX2 66 couldn't be any slower than that, could it?

Quite possibly the only reason I'm doing this is to see how slow it really is. I can only tell for myself. If the system isn't usable (yes that's correct grammar) I'll probably end up running Dos/WfW 3.11, 95, or 98. A 486 build of Mandrake might be an option.

Reid

http://reid.tk

 

[lifto]

My mistake...

min requirement is a 486 dx33 not a 25.