Windows NT 4.0 Shell & USB
Apart from using NT 4.0 for a year or so in one of my first office jobs in combination with Novell Netware, I've never really needed to use it. I recently installed NT 4.0 Workstation on a couple of ThinkPads of mine - a 380ED (P 166MMX, 80MB RAM, 4.8GB HDD) and a 380Z (P II 300, 96MB RAM, 7GB HDD). Both of these run NT 4.0 very nicely and drivers are no issue. Unlike Win 98, being able to just gain access to a Win 10 or Server 2012 box over the home network it's very convenient - it just works. In comparison, a ThinkPad 380XD I have running Win98 SE only gets me access to a Server 2003 R2 VM I have running after having to install the Active Directory client.
I recall NT 4.0 being advertised being more in line with Win 95. Using it I feel it's NT 3.51 with an updated desktop shell without additional bells and whistles. There's no plug and play by default, no Device Manager, and using Control Panel to install drivers is much the same as NT 3.x. It made me wonder why things such as this didn't arrive until Win 2000 considering release dates.
On a side note, has anyone been successful getting USB working on NT 4.0? There was never official support, and apparently some Chinese guy years ago created a USB driver of some sort to get it working with various levels of success.
I recall NT 4.0 being advertised being more in line with Win 95. Using it I feel it's NT 3.51 with an updated desktop shell without additional bells and whistles. There's no plug and play by default, no Device Manager, and using Control Panel to install drivers is much the same as NT 3.x. It made me wonder why things such as this didn't arrive until Win 2000 considering release dates.
On a side note, has anyone been successful getting USB working on NT 4.0? There was never official support, and apparently some Chinese guy years ago created a USB driver of some sort to get it working with various levels of success.
Comments
http://ftp1.digi.com/support/driver/i4usb406.exe
It was made for use with some camera, and can access mass storage devices.
Although for most larger flash drives you will also need a fat32 driver like this one: http://ashedel.chat.ru/fat32/ or the one from Systeminternals.
For vintage machines not used for gaming I'm actually beginning to like NT 4.0 especially for earlier Pentium machines with less than 128MB RAM. It's reliable and is snappy in performance. NT 4.0 domains to administer were not quite as beautiful.