Q: What are the
advantages of the Windows NT 4.0 interface over its predecessors?
By now, many of us are
familiar with NT 4.0's interface, which you see in Screen 1. What's most
impressive about this interface is its ability to change appearance. You don't
have to reboot to change several display characteristics, which is a blessing
elsewhere in the OS. For example, you can add tape drivers without rebooting.
These slight changes do wonders to make NT a mainstream network OS.
Q: I've heard about NT
4.0's new administrative tools and wizards. What do they let you do?
The administrative tools
you see in Screen 2 and the setup wizards in Screen 3 ease setup and maintenance
of both NT Server and Workstation. Microsoft markedly improved the installation
routine by adding a procedure that restarts the installation process following a
crashed installation.
Q: I've run NT 3.51 for a
long time, and it's proven stable. Why should I upgrade to NT 4.0? Doesn't
moving the graphic heaps to ring 0 make NT 4.0 more subject to crashing?
Every reason I can think of
suggests that moving to NT 4.0 is not only a good idea but essential. All
software revisions will target NT 4.0--in part, because NT shares DLLs with
Windows 95.
Microsoft increased the graphic speed in NT 4.0 by moving the graphic heap
to ring 0. Although this restructuring allows faster video processing, it also
makes every NT 3.51 video and print driver obsolete in NT 4.0. (Print drivers
are in the GUI, which means they're also in ring 0. Because ring 0 code can
crash the system, a bad print driver can now crash the system.) In fact, if you
have an NT 3.51 workstation attached to an NT 4.0 server, you can't print from
the NT 3.51 workstation to the NT 4.0 server without adding the NT 3.51 print
driver locally. This configuration can be a serious issue in large networks.
NT 4.0 will have new video drivers to accommodate moving the graphic heaps,
but many new features (easier setup and control with wizards, addition of
Telephony API--TAPI--network browsing, hardware profiles, etc.) make it
a preferable OS. All these improvements are substantial.
In all my testing with NT 4.0, I haven't encountered a graphic-induced
crash. Moving the heap to the kernel makes sense. Upgrade!
Q: Will NT 4.0 finally
have joystick drivers?
Yes, NT 4.0 installs
joystick drivers by default, which means Microsoft is serious about adding
components to NT 4.0 that aren't in NT 3.51. In a similar move, Microsoft
included the Wang imaging applet, which Screen 4 shows. This applet lets you
date-stamp bitmaps, a handy feature for faxing. Although not in the NT 4.0
release, fax capabilities will probably appear in an early NT 4.0 Service Pack.