I'm not sure just how many people out there are running Windows NT on
laptops, although I've met a few brave souls (and Microsoft even ran its NT 4.0
Preview Tour on a Compaq LTE 5200). But I am sure about the trouble I had
getting set up to do it. I think you'll appreciate learning what I learned, so
you can avoid the problems I had in such areas as hardware brand compatibility,
video drivers, and power management.
Somebody Help Me!
The first fact you need to know is that Microsoft's Hardware Compatibility
List (HCL) is essential--and even this aid is no guarantee of success. NT will
work with most major name-brand systems, such as NEC, Compaq, Hewlett-Packard
(HP), IBM, AST, and several clones, but not without some difficulty. Under NT
3.51, certain functions still do not work well on portables. These functions
include power management (to preserve battery life, as opposed to the UPS
manager) and PC Card (formerly PCMCIA) drivers--you'd better not remove or
insert a card while the system is running. And the installation process is far
from clean.
To illustrate, let me relate my experience with an NEC Versa M/75 (75-MHz
80486DX4, 16MB of RAM, 340MB hard drive). Getting it fully functional with NT
took about a week, back in August 1995. At that time, I was unable to get a
release version of NT Workstation 3.51 on floppy disks, which left the obvious
question of how to get it into my portable.
This question proved to be a major stumbling block. I had beta versions of
NT 3.5 and NT 3.51 on floppy, but they were incompatible with the NEC hardware.
So, the PC Card drivers didn't let the network card function.
A functioning network card was important because the full release of NT
3.51 was on CD on a networked server: Only if the network card worked could I
access the CD. So, after about five different installations of NT and fiddling
with every conceivable setting to make it work, I finally realized that a CD-ROM
drive plugged into the portable might work. I hunted down a DOS-driven CD-ROM
drive, installed its software, and was able to do a winnt.exe/b to boot and load
directly from the CD.
Amazingly enough, the attempt worked. With the full-release versions of PC
Card (formerly PCMCIA) drivers, the network card and modem (a 3Com EtherLink III
and a Megahertz 28.8 XJack) finally worked, too.
Then came the problem of video drivers. Because this NEC had a true-color
TFT display (16.8 million colors), obtaining proper drivers was a problem.
Ultimately, I got them from NEC's bulletin board, but I had to install NT again
because something got clobbered. This problem might also apply to other systems
(such as AST for its Ascentia 910N) if the manufacturer has not delivered NT
drivers for their displays. I learned that the only solution for the AST is to
use the standard VGA display driver, which gives a resolution of only 640*480 or
800*600 pixels at 16 colors, no matter how much video RAM the laptop has.
Even after I finally got my system to work, day-to-day operation was not bug
free, either. The motherboard burned out, taking my modem and network card with
it. NEC took about two weeks to fix it. And, the system would periodically erase
my COM port settings so that the modem wouldn't work, and Remote Access Service
(RAS) couldn't do anything. (Hardware failures before the final burnout may have
contributed to this glitch.) This recurrent problem wouldn't have been so
annoying, but the solution was never the same twice. I had to go through
different gyrations and dances each time, deleting COM settings, recreating
them, reinstalling RAS and the modem drivers, and so forth. Fortunately, the
problems stopped when I replaced the main board.
Some things work surprisingly well on my NEC, though. The video is great
(now that I have the right software). Power-management functions appear to be
fully operational up to the level of the system's BIOS (the same is not true on
AST portables), allowing for a sleep mode, screen blanking, and spin up/down of
the internal hard disk. NEC doesn't support more advanced features such as CPU
standby, but some manufacturers, such as Canon with its PN-100 PowerPC-based
notebook, have designed power management into their systems. These systems
include full support for sleep and hibernation modes and disk spin-down.