Windows NT 4.0 - Comparison With Windows 95

Comparison With Windows 95

While providing much greater stability than Windows 95, it was also less flexible from a desktop perspective. Much of the stability was gained by the use of protected memory and the hardware abstraction layer. Direct hardware access was disallowed and "misbehaving" applications were terminated without needing the computer to be restarted. The trade-off was that NT required an excessive amount of memory (32 MB for normal desktop use, 128 MB or more for heavy 3D applications) in comparison to consumer targeted products such as Windows 95.

While nearly all programs written for Windows 95 will run on Windows NT, many 3D games would not, due in part to Windows NT 4.0 having limited support for DirectX (however, it was possible to play many of them in OpenGL or software rendering). Third-party device drivers were an alternative to access the hardware directly, but poorly written drivers became a frequent source of "stop errors". Such failures began to be referred to as the "blue screen of death" or BSOD and would require the system to be restarted in such cases. These errors were very rare if using the appropriate drivers and it was not uncommon for NT servers or workstations to run for months at a time without failure. By comparison, Windows consumer versions at the time were much less stable and popularized the belief that all Windows versions were unreliable..

Windows NT 4.0 is also less user-friendly than Windows 95 when it comes to certain maintenance and management tasks; for instance, in spite of shipping a year later than Windows 95, by default there is no Plug and Play support and no Device Manager (although limited support could be installed later) which greatly simplifies installation of hardware devices. Many basic DOS applications would run, however graphical DOS applications would not run due to the way they accessed graphics hardware. Although Windows NT 4.0 introduced APIs for defragmentation, there was no built-in defrag utility, unlike Windows 95. Also, Windows NT 4.0 lacked USB support, a preliminary version of which would be added to OEM editions of Windows 95 in OSR 2.1.

The difference between the NT/2000 and 95/98 lines of Windows ended with the arrival of the different versions of Windows XP. At that time, the APIs —such as OpenGL and DirectX— had matured sufficiently to be more efficient to write for common PC hardware. On the other hand, the hardware itself had become powerful enough to handle the API processing overhead acceptably.