I am wondering about two aspects of Windows NT 4.0 that I can't be sure on and was wondering if you could help:
1) Can you run 16-bit apps under NT 4.0?
2) Has NT 4.0 got the same FAT32 system that the release 2 of Win95 has that will only work up to 2.08Gb of HDD in the 4K cluster sizes?
- David Armstrong
1) The Windows 95 API contained both 16-bit and 32-bit components allowing Windows 3.x programs to run. Windows NT runs 16-bit apps in a separate shell called a Virtual DOS Machine or VDM. The VDM emulates the MS-DOS/Windows 3.x environment. You lose a tiny bit on performance but you gain a lot in stability. 16-bit apps that do not run or are unstable under Windows 95 (and there are many) often work well with Windows NT. The good news is that Windows 97 will run 16-bit apps in the same way as NT does.
2) NT does not incorporate FAT32 and as far as I know has no plans to do so. NT uses the superior NTFS (New Technology File System). The only problem comes from having both NT and 95 booting on the same computer. Unless you have separate partitions for each then the hard drive must be formatted using FAT16. It is FAT16 that can only handle up to 2Gb. FAT32 can handle 6Gb using 4K clusters and 2,048Gb using 32K clusters. NTFS can happily handle one exabyte or 264 bytes of data.
- Roy Chambers
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Category: Windows NT
Issue: Mar 1997
Pages: 161-162
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NT bits and pieces