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Well, yesterday I had a wonderful time, because I had to downgrade a
perfectly working PC from Windows XP to Windows NT.
When XP first appeared, I regarded NT as lean, simple, fast and stable.
XP on the other hand was bloated, overcomplicated, buggy and slow.
Well, let us look at the Windows NT installation and setup process,
shall we?
First you boot from the installation CD. Nothing new there. After a
moment or two of thrashing the head of the CD drive, you enter a
text-mode setup program, not unlike the one for XP.
There are a few little gotchas though. Firstly, the setup program
doesn't comprehend harddrives larger than 8 GB. (!!) Yes, this OS
predates large HDs. This is from the era where some HDs had a special
"capacity limit" jumper so as not to confuse MS-DOS or other primitive OSes.
So you can only see 8GB right now. But that's rather moot. You see, you
can create a partition as large as you like, but you can only *format* a
partition that is 4 GB or smaller.
The reason? Well, after creating the partition, you select the
filesystem you want. If you select FAT, the partition is formatted as
FAT. If you select NTFS, the partition is *still* formatted as FAT and
then *converted* to NTFS half way through the installation process.
FAT only supports 4 GB partitions, so even though the installer can see
up to 8 GB of space, you can only use 4 GB of it.
Once formatting has finished (which, on the 80 GB drive I was using, is
surprisingly fast...), several bazillion tiny files are copied to the
new partition. The computer then reboots... and enters setup again.
Yes, that's right. You have to remember to remove the install CD or it
start the installation process again. The Windows XP CD checks whether
an OS is installed and *prompts* you whether to enter setup if an OS is
found (and enters immediately if there is no OS yet). But Windows NT
does not have this refinement; _you_ must remember to yank the CD out
before the machine reboots.
Once you do this, the machine appears to be booting Windows NT. (For
those that don't remember, you get a black NT DETECT screen, followed by
a blue screen that says something like "Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 build
387273562734 UniProcessor Free 256 MB RAM...") Then the harddrive is
converted from FAT to NTFS. And then the computer reboots again. (Woe to
he who put the CD back in already!)
So now the PC is booting *again*, and you get the same blue screen. But
now a graphical setup program starts up, and immediately demands to
access the install CD. (Windows XP does this also, but since you
probably haven't removed the CD in the first place...)
The graphical portion is running at something absurd like 640x480 in
16-colour mode. It's like a trip back to the Windows 3.11 days. It looks
nausiating. Each character of text is the size of a small house.
Here XP and NT show there common linage: They are both carefully
designed so that you *cannot* just answer the installer's questions and
then come back when it's all finished. Because the installer asks you a
few things, installs some stuff, and then asks you more questions, then
does that bit, then pops up more questions. This *forces* you to
actually stand over the PC for the entire duration of the install.
The very first question is the license key. So I go look that up,
because I don't remember the answer any more. Then it asks for a name
and company. (What does it *use* this for anyway??) After a while, we
get to the "interesting" questions.
For example... what brand of network card do you have?
Ah, maybe you had forgotten? XP is a fully PnP OS, but NT requires you
to *tell* it what driver to install. Better yet, the Windows NT CD I
have was pressed about 15 years ago, so just about any imaginable NIC
you can buy today didn't exist when this CD was pressed. In other words,
there's no way in hell the driver you need is on the CD.
Regardless, the installer insists on spending 3 minutes building a
driver list before allowing you to click the "have disk..." button. At
this point, I switch to a working PC to scour the face of the Internet
for Windows NT drivers for a VIA Technologies VT6102 Ethernet NIC.
Fortunately this PC used to have Windows NT on it originally, so drivers
do in fact exist. Unzipping the driver package comes to 2 MB - too large
for a single floppy. But reading one of the multiple text files tells me
which *.SYS, *.DLL and *.INF files I need to copy. So I manually make a
driver disk, and the NT installer seems happy with that.
(It's rather amusing that instead of selecting a network card, you can
configure a dialup modem at this point...)
After several more questions, the installer finally finishes what it's
doing. Getting to this point used to take at least an hour back when NT
was a popular OS. But on the 1.6 GHz AMD Duron I'm using, with it's 80
GB HD, it's actually pretty fast. Having finished installing, the
computer reboots *again*.
This time, we get the full Windows NT boot sequence. For some reason,
this includes a 30-second delay where I can select whether to boot
normally or in "VGA mode". Anyway, booting up gives me a very low
resolution login prompt, not unlike Windows XP.
Logging in, the computer is a nightmare to operate. The NumLock is off
by default. Open a command prompt and it's wider than the entire screen.
(This makes closing the window "interesting".) But of course, my first
task is... to install Service Pack 6a, the last one made for this OS.
Once I eventually remember how to do this [I have the unpacked files on
one of my servers], it's a fairly simple matter.
[Amoung other things, the OS can now see all 80 GB of the harddrive.]
Having updated, I now want to install the graphics driver. I find the
Zip file on the server, and unpack it. (Remember, Windows XP can
automatically handle Zip files, but not NT.) I unpack the files onto the
machine, and look for a Setup.exe file...
...silly me! This is Windows NT. Under Windows XP, you install devices
by clicking on Setup.exe (or similar) and pressing [Next] a few times.
Under Windows NT, things are far more complicated. In this instance,
installing the device driver is as follows:
1. Open Display Properties.
2. Select Display Type.
3. Select Change Type...
4. Wait 3 minutes for the computer to build a list of obsolete graphics
cards.
5. Select Have Disk...
6. Point to the *.INF file in the unpacked folder.
7. A dialogue warns you that "This driver is provided by a third party.
It may or may not work with Windows NT. Your computer may become
unstable by installing this driver. Do you wish to proceed?" (Um, WTF?
YES!!)
8. The computer copies a few files, and then *insists* on rebooting.
When the computer boots back up, the NumLock is once again turned off,
but at least the login prompt is now in 256 colours. (I'm not
kidding...) Still the same spatial resolution though. But logging in,
I'm able to set it to true-colour and the resolution of my LCD. Now I
can turn on "smooth the edges of screen fonts" and "show icons using all
possible colours". (But you have to reboot for it to take effect.)
[Actually, a dialogue *claims* you must reboot. In reality, logging out
and back in is sufficient. Note that each time you log out, the screen
resolution changes back to what it was when the machine first booted. It
continues to do this until you reboot, where the new resolution becomes
permanent.]
At this point, I use a registry hack I know to permanently turn on the
NumLock key.
Ah, but what's this? Could it be...? Yes, it is. It's Internet Explorer
v1.0. In case you've never seen it, let be describe it. The default
colour scheme is black text on a 50% grey background. The font is
Tomahor, with no antialias. The buttons look like something from the
days of Windows 3 - which they probably *are*! It doesn't support CSS,
scripting, frames, images... It's an entire world of black text on grey
backgrouns. The only colour comes from nonstandard <FONT> tags and the
BGCOLOR attibute.
When you've finished scrubbing your eyeballs out, it's time to try to
figure out how the **** to update it. Surprisingly, Microsoft's website
does still host the download. You grab a 2MB file and run it, and it
proceeds to download a further 12MB of data and install it. (Depending
on what options you select. Some of them are quite comical. JavaScript
is *optional*??) So now it's IE 6 SP1. (But there's a slew of security
updates after that... which I can't be bothered with.)
Now it's time to install Office 97. This is a relatively simple
procedure. Having installed it, it needs updating to Service Release 2B.
To do this, you have to open Excel (or whatever) and look up a unique
serial number from the About box, and type that by hand into the update
tool. (WTF?) But after that it's quite simple. But you must, of course,
reboot.
Remember the Office Toolbar? Most buggy application launcher known to
mankind? Yeah. Great days...
Next it's time to install the device driver for the 8-port serial
adaptor. Oh great times! I put the CD in and click the "install driver"
button. It unpacks some files and then exists. Doesn't even tell me
where it put them. Hunting through the files it dropped, I eventually
find a README.TXT which tells me how to install the device driver:
1. Open Control Panel.
2. Select Network. (!!)
3. Go to the Adaptors tab.
4. Select Add Adaptor. (So... I'm adding a new network adaptor?!)
5. Select the *.INF file just unpacked.
6. The serial ports show up as a new network device. (WTF?!)
Installing the driver for the GPIB card is even more fun. An installer
does actually install the driver *for* you. (This is the very first
driver install that has been automatic.) However, after the driver is
installed, you must manually *tell* it how many GPIB interfaces you
have, and what their model numbers are. (!!)
Obviously I don't have this information to hand, so much guessing
ensues... Mercifully, a test facility as provided, so you can easily
determine when you've got it right. (I also love the way that you have
to open certain config windows and then close them without actually
doing anything, but it doesn't work otherwise...)
In summary... I hope I don't have to do this again in a hurry! Not my
idea of a fun time. :-P
In fairness, NT was quite a lot faster than XP. But that's about all it
had going for it.
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com> wrote: