First post, by chinny22
- Rank
- l33t++
According to Wiki NT 3.51 turns 25 today so lets celebrate with a bit of a post about one of the most overlooked family of Windows.
I shall be using my somewhat period correct dual PPro with 256MB of Ram, Matrox Mystique and 2 8GB CF cards.
Duel Pentium Pro build
My first hurdle was HDD partitioning.
I was dual booting with dos 7 so c:\ needs to be Fat16
The drive that you are installing NT on should be at max 2GB, any more and setup crashes when converting it from Fat to NTFS, work around do exist but 2GB is massive anyway.
Also for some reason NT cant read logical partitions I create in fdisk. Not a big problem, just create them in NT after and Dos can read them fine.
In the end I went with 2GB FAT 16 for c:\ and rest of the first CF card is a Fat32 partition of dos games.
the 2nd CF card has a 2GB NTFS partition for NT, 1GB Fat16 as a dumping ground shared between the 2 OS's and rest a NTFS data drive for programs.
With that out the way installing NT is easy enough and much like NT4. Start with 3 floppies and has an amusing option to install by floppy or CD once it reaches that point. It detects my multiple CPU’s and loads the correct HAL automatically. In fact the only change I have to make is select UK rather then US region at the text level set up.
Graphical part is different to NT4 but straightforward. If you have your NIC drivers on the HDD like I did make a note of the path, as you don’t have the browse option!
Unlike Windows 3x this is built round TCP which makes life easy. IF you are installing SMS server may as well install the “Network Monitor Agent” now and save a step later on.
Once up and running, install any drivers and SP5. SP5 also changes the blue boot reporting total RAM from KB to MB, nice touch!
Winworld has a download of all post SP5 updates, most interesting for me was Y2k, and an update for this brand new currency the euro. Dates seem to display ok and none of the security patches bother me so haven’t applied any myself.
Onto the software!
The 16bit IE 5.01 is the latest version supported, cool thing here is it supports right mouse click. Where as the OS itself doesn’t.
I’ve also installed Netscape 3 as it just feels right on Windows 3x machines
I also like Winzip on my 3.x GUI’s in which case Winzip 7.0 SR1 is the latest. Office 97 is the final version supported which is what I’m typing this up on 😀
Backoffice 2.0 gives you the last version of Microsoft server software like Exchange and SQL but will get more into them later.
As you can see the desktop looks very Windows 3.x but with a few small differences.
Up the top it tells you the logged on user, in this case Administrator of the NT351 domain
The little head on some of the program groups indicate they are user specific. The ones without the head are common to all users, That’s right This is Windows 3 with proper user profiles.
You also have NT type things as services, event viewer, etc which 9x never got.
Thais it for Part 1, I admit this is a rush post to get out on the correct day.
Part 2 will be installing Backoffice 2.0 (which isn't actually 25 yet)