by Serdar Yegulalp
WINDOWS NT ISN'T for everyone. How do you know if it's right for
you? Here's a list of scenarios that typically call for Microsoft's
other Windows offerings.
Later for laptops. Windows NT offers some laptop-oriented
features, including PCMCIA support, but running NT on a portable
remains challenging. Many notebooks can't support more than 16MB
of RAM. The slow hard drives and unusual graphics hardware found
in notebooks make running NT even more difficult. Stick with Win95
on the road.
Likewise for legacy/specialized systems. Nonlocal-bus or
ISA-bus hardware, especially video cards, will further bottleneck
NT's performance. Older SCSI controllers, particularly 8-bit models,
are being phased out of NT's driver library. NT also suffers from
spotty support for EIDE, as developers concentrate on 16-bit SCSI
support. Complicating matters, NT can't run a lengthy list of
DOS applications, because such software often makes direct hardware
calls. To improve stability, NT blocks direct calls to hardware.
If you depend on DOS application support, 16-bit scanners, sound
cards and joysticks, it's probably easier to run Win95 or even
Windows 3.1x than to replace your hardware. In general, if your
hardware is more than two years old, you should consider a total
upgrade before you run NT.
Cross-platform? Not quite. Microsoft's Windows 95 logo
was supposed to indicate and ensure, among other things, that
a Win95 application would run on NT. Such cross-platform nirvana
has yet to become reality. Microsoft bent its own rules by allowing
several Win95 fax programs to earn the logo. That was a questionable
move, because many fax programs use TAPI, a telephony API NT didn't
support until release 4.0. For stability reasons, NT still doesn't
support VxDs and direct hardware calls, which are used by numerous
Win95 applications. To compensate, many developers now offer a
single CD-ROM containing both Win95 and NT versions of their software.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to introduce a new Win32 logo
that truly ensures an application will run on both Windows 95
and NT. Even so, there's a long list of Win95 software that just
doesn't run on NT.
