When I worked at a bank, I had access to all these Pentium 90 desktops, so I loaded NT 4 TS onto a dozen or so of these things and sent htem out to every site, and it was GREAT!

I loaded ciscoworks for windows onto them, along with PPTP servers to build my own VPN backbone, and it was a dream for not only doing remote access, but collection of stats and whatnot. It was super easy to deploy MSDE, and setup a server to pull data from each site, and do snmp stats and graphs. Hours of fun.

If I were smarter I’d have saved the source and sold it, as ‘modern’ stuff is just as wimpy as we all use the same SNMP data.

I was curious about the “.NET won’t install” comment here and did some digging. As far as I can tell, .NET 2.0 doesn’t support NT 4 in general, so this comment must be referring to 1.1 or older. I used /T and /C to extract the MSI and looked around for the check, and couldn’t find it: it turns out the check is in the install.exe, so if you extract the MSI and just run that it installs fine.

Also, for those who like to fight with installers, get Orca from a 2003-or-thereabouts platform SDK. I’ve used this in the past to patch MSIs that have silly version blocks.

I’m not a heavy user of .NET and 1.x wasn’t that popular to begin with, so I don’t know how much of it works…but it does install.

I wish modern Windows had the same character NT 4.0 has.

Of course don't expect to do anything too modern with NT 4.0 – I can run Opera 10 snapshots on it though 🙂