harddrivespin wrote:

or find some old machine made for it.

...or, build one specifically made for it? 🤣

PTherapist wrote:

I've used NT 4 on much lesser hardware than what is being recommended here, so I'd say the proposed spec seems fine.

Back in the early 2000s, I had NT 4 Workstation running nicely on a pair of 486SX 33MHz systems - though they both had 64MB RAM installed which probably accounts for why they weren't unbearable to use. At the time it was a nice stable alternative to Windows 95 and seemed to peform a lot smoother than 98 on the same hardware and could even still browse the web back in the early 2000s.

I also had NT 4 Terminal Server Edition installed on a 486 DX4 120MHz PC, that was mostly just a novelty though.

Hmmmm... Came to think about it.
Back when I studiet pottery in 96, I saw someone install NT4 workstation on a 486sx33.
Something about the amount of Ram that the system need in order to install.
Was it 12mb minimum in order for the system to allow installation, or 16? I can no remember.
Anyway... He installed it on eighter 12 or 16, and removed some memory and ran it on 8mb.

I have a love/hate relationship with NT4
It was the last "serious" OS with its lack of plug and play, device manager, any real attempt to support gaming, etc. and for that it gets my respect.
But those same points make it pretty limited at home, yet I've usually have at least 1 NT4 box set up throughout my life, mostly due to its low hardware requirements.

First was my "server" in the late 90's built from old systems, P90? Whatever spare IDE drives I had responsible for DHCP, File server and MS Proxy to share out our dial up internet.
Early 2000's, 486 DX2 66 with 64MB ram, when it became light use MS Office PC,NT4 workstation was slow to load, but once in behaved much better then Win95.
Last 5 years, Terminal Server installed on my Proliant 1600, mainly because NT4 just feels more right as that system has no USB and isn't ATX compliant.
TS just so I can be lazy and remote in.

Does anyone have Hardware Compatibility List for Windows NT 4.0 (x86)? Microsoft's link is dead. I too would like a build but most motherboard manufacturers doesn't support it. Can you use win2000 drivers instead?

digicube wrote on 2020-12-25, 00:39:

Can you use win2000 drivers instead?

No. Win2000 drivers use a model called WDM, which is a total and complete departure from the monolithic service style drivers used in NT4. Google for "NT4 service device drivers" and "WDM" for details. This fundamental rework in the Base, Kernel and HAL to support WDM is one of the reasons why NT5 took so much to get released, and didn't become completely stable until WinXP SP2 era... And this is also the reason why NT lost many of its portability advantage it had until then. WDM platforms have to meet a set of hardware requisites, like hw arbiters, and a built in enumeration mechanism (PnP platforms can use the one provided by hardware bus, like PCI. SoC and hardwired platforms without bus are mandated to use ACPI).

I have a dual slot P3 build with 1gb of ram which I've used for NT 3.51, NT 4, and Solaris x86. I remember using NT on severely overtaxed systems at the time, and I enjoy the contrast provided by a system with specifications so ridiculous it would have seemed out of a sci fi movie at the time.