Windows NT4 laptop build on Dell Latitude CPx

 It is hard to believe anyone would be, but I find myself in 2025 a bit nostalgic for the days using Windows NT 4 workstation systems.

Yeah, I know. I should probably seek professional help.

For non-business users, Windows NT 4 had endless driver problems causing blue screens, no plug and play support, limited USB support, and limited device and game compatibility due to DirectX 3 being the maximum version (or OpenGL support).

And yet..it was incredibly successful. Why? Because it was a business oriented operating system that most companies of the era used. Pure and simple.

People didn't buy Windows NT 4 to play games and demos. They bought it to use Microsoft Office, Visio, Project, ERP clients, and other business applications. They used Lotus Notes or Microsoft Outlook connected to back end Lotus Domino R5 or Exchange 5.5 servers hosted on Windows NT 4 Server with Windows NT domain controllers. They ran PC Anywhere to enable remote support via local network or over a modem connection. Yep, that modem support was painful - I did it.

I know well about Windows NT 4. I built lots of them.

Actually, when I started working in IT professionally in the late 1990's, fresh out of university, I found a Windows for Workgroups 3.11 work environment, running purely workgroups and unmanaged network switches. 

No domain controllers, no back end Exchange servers, and no internet (except for the finance/HR director and CEO with 56k dial up modems!). 

Active directory didn't arrive until Windows 2000 Server, unless of course you ran Novell Netware Groupware which had something eerily similar for years that Microsoft...errmm...copied to create Active Directory services..

I had started learning how to build Windows NT 4 while at university. Not at the university IT courses, but at home. I bought Windows NT 4 workstation academic edition and focused on teaching myself all about it. Outside the IT department, all other departments at the uni were using NT 4. My dad's work and customers were using it.

It turned out I really needed to focus on NT 4 server, but I couldn't afford that as a poor uni student!
I quickly learnt in my first job as a IT Systems Administrator though, and built many Windows NT 4 servers, and also deployed hundreds of Windows NT 4 workstation computers, connected to the Windows NT 4 servers across 40 or so office locations across Australia.
I learnt how to build Applications and databases, investigated and fixed many Y2K issues for multiple databases, configured Remote Access services to sync data from remote offices over modem from Palm Pilots, laptops, manufacturing barcode implementation and much more besides.
I also learnt how to code HTML and ASP on Windows NT4.
So, as you can see, I have a lot of history with it, and I decided I should have a Windows NT 4 workstation machine in my setup at home.
I decided to go with a period correct business Dell Latitude CPx laptop. It supports Windows NT4 and has a driver CD on the internet to give me the all important NT4 drivers.

It also has a unique party piece - It has a modular bay that support CD-ROMs, floppy drives and a ZIP250 drive!

At first I thought I scored really well with my choice - it arrived in good condition.

It came with the CD-ROM module and the floppy drive module, along with the power supply. There was no Zip 250 drive module, but I sourced one from the USA. While I was waiting for it, I took a look at this machine. 
On the left side is the dual PCMCIA (PC-Card) slots which are very important as many of this era laptops didn't have network ports or WiFi in them, Also on this left side is the hard disk behind a screw secured slot:

I opened it up and it looked very clean indeed. As was usual for this era, the computer has a accupoint trackpoint mouse embedded in the centre of the keyboard, and a touchpad at the bottom - so two sets of left and right buttons.

Looking on the right side now, I have the usual Audio out, headphone and Mic input, a S-Video output connector for TV and IR port for connection to other IR devices like Printers, PDA's and more. 

The front of the laptop has the battery module in the left side, and the CD-ROM module in the right side:

Flipping the laptop over I see the triangle shaped release buttons for removing the battery and CD-ROM modules.

It has a product key for Windows 98 second edition, and indeed that is the system installed on the laptop when I received it.

At the back of the laptop is power input a Serial port, a PS/2 keyboard/mouse input, single USB port (useless with NT4), docking station connector, Parallel port and VGA port.

I removed the modules from the laptop, and put them alongside the floppy drive:

I slid the floppy drive module in and confirmed it does indeed fit this laptop, which is a relief!

Sadly the modules only fit the right hand side bay. The left side only fits the battery. The right side can accept a second battery though to give a much longer battery life for business road warriors.

It is easy to forget just how clunky, fragile and heavy these laptops were in this era. 

We are spoilt these days with sleek lightweight and strong metal framed laptops. This was a typical business laptop of the period. Heavy, loads of plastic, and fragile.

As it was sent to me, the laptop has a small noisy spinning 12GB IDE hard disk. This laptop has a Pentium II 650Mhz, 256MB memory, ATI graphics card with 8MB memory, ESS Maestro 3 sound card, and a CD-ROM drive (with swappable floppy drive)

Interestingly the BIOS includes a useful battery level information screen, covering both module bays if you have two batteries installed in it.

Given the age of the machine, I expect the battery will be useless. I keep it connected to power whenever I use it.

I fixed the time/date and booted the system into Windows 98.

It booted relatively quickly, and soon into the Windows 98 desktop:

Satisfied the system worked, I shut down and set to work removing the hard disk.

As is usual for this era, the hard disk tray encloses the standard IDE hard disk with a custom connector.

I remove the custom connector to IDE converter, as I will need it to connect to my planned Windows NT4 build CF card converter.

I connected it up and then re-installed it back into the tray.

I then slid the whole thing back into the hard disk bay. It was at this point I noticed a crack in the top of the laptop base. I realised that the screen locking mechanism had caused the plastic to fail at a stress point.

I ignored it for now since I was not closing the laptop lid while working on the build. 
I booted into the BIOS to make sure the new 32GB hard disk was detected correctly - it was.
So, next I inserted the Windows NT 4 workstation CD into the drive and booted from it.

The setup screen came up and I thought great, this is going to work.

And then it didn't. Windows NT setup couldn't find the hard disk.

The CF card is prepped with FAT32, and Windows NT 4 doesn't support it. But that is not the only problem - it can't find the disk at all. It shouldn't care about the partitions, since it can wipe them anyway.
I rebooted to try it again.
I put some tape over the broken plastic on the laptop as I didn't want it to get worse - not sure why it chose now to fail, but it is what it is. It is quite old after all and brittle plastic is normal for laptops of this age.

For whatever reason, the second time I run the Windows NT setup, it found the hard disk just fine.

I deleted the old FAT32 partition, and setup a new partition using the whole disk:

This failed. I remembered why - it is because until Service Pack 4, Windows NT 4 could only be installed on a 4GB partition or lower. My CD is not a Service Pack 4 patched install CD.

I delete the 32GB NTFS partition, prepped a new 4096MB (4GB) partition and left the rest of the disk empty. I will add the other partition once Service pack 4 is installed.

The Windows NT4 installation then proceeded as normal:

It then reached the reboot phase. I removed the CD, rebooted and...nothing. It didn't boot at all. Sigh.

I suspected the cause was the MBR on the hard disk wasn't written correctly. I change the CD-ROM module to a floppy module and booted from the Windows 98 setup floppy disk to a command prompt.

This had the nice side effect of confirming the floppy drive module also works well!

I ran fdisk from the floppy disk, and deleted and prepared a FAT partition of 4096MB.

Note that when creating a partition this way, I need to set it active.

When that is done, the status 'A' appears next to the partition.

I then exit and run fdisk /mbr, which formats the drive with a Master Boot Record (MBR) scheme for the hard disk.

I then re-ran the Windows NT 4 workstation setup from the CD again, and this time all worked as expected. It booted from the hard disk after the first phase with no problems.

Yay, I can now setup Windows NT 4 the way I want.

Go straight to the Custom install for IT administrators - I have built hundred of these machines...

I install pretty much everything available, since I don't want to have to install it again later from CD. I fished out my 3Com Etherlink PCMCIA card, which I plan to use for networking from this laptop.

Install completed, reboot time!

I booted into the standard 640x480x16 colour desktop. I copied the I386 folder from the install CD to the hard disk. This is because when Windows NT4 needs system files from the original CD, it gets them from this folder. If you have it on the hard disk, you can point the system to it and avoid fishing out the CD - it is also way faster to copy the files...

In this era, CD's autoran - I inserted the Windows NT4 Service Pack 3 CD first as I need to patch Windows NT 4. In this case a web interface pops up in Internet Explorer to provide instructions on how to install SP3.

In reality, I needed to install Service Pack 4, then lastly Service Pack 6. This took quite a while.

Later Windows NT 4 applications need SP4 or SP6 to work, included many system drivers. That is why I have waited until I got to SP4 before I installed the drivers for the laptop from the resource CD.

PC Card drivers, audio, video, Intel chipset, and many more..

Having the video drivers installed meant that after a reboot I could finally use all of that lovely screen:

I quickly increased the resolution:

I thought it was 12780x1024, but turns out I was wrong. It is 1024x768.

Makes such a difference - I have room to work now on the desktop:

Lost count how many times I looked at this Windows NT 4 log in page - very nostalgic:

As you probably know, machines of this era should not be connected to the internet. They have so many security holes, and can be compromised quickly and in turn, compromise your home network too.

I installed a pile of patches and security updates I have on a CD I prepared and kept from that era when I built these machines - once again it is very helpful.
I also installed the NT4 option pack CD, which has the all important Personal Web services (IIS) for hosting your websites on your local computer. This is another CD I kept from that era.
When I first learned to code HTML and ASP, it was using a IIS setup on NT 4 workstation. I learnt how to query databases via ODBC in my websites. I kept some of that code, and wanted to have it setup on this laptop also, since a lot of the code no longer works on newer machines due to reliance on VBScript, Javascript, Java VM and other long obsolete web technologies.
I set to work configuring the Personal Web server.

With that done, I turned my attention to the partition setup. 

Service Pack 4 was installed, so I could now prep the hard disk second partition to use the remaining drive space on the 32GB hard disk. I put Service Pack 6 on first though.
 

I then used Disk Administrator to create the new partition and format NTFS.

A little quirk with Windows NT is the need to change the CD drive letter from D:\
 to a later drive letter, in this case F:\. 
This is so I can align the second partition which initially uses E:\ to use D:\. This is because when you remove the CD drive module, it will screw with the drive letter allocations...
Once done I set the CD drive letter to E:\

Now I have heaps of room:

I set to work installing Microsoft Office XP, which is the last version of Office that works on Windows NT4.

I then installed WinAmp (as you have to in this era!), and listened to some mp3's from a CD I copied to my new blank D:\ partition.

I was pretty happy at this point. I fired up Outlook XP, and imported my mailbox from the 2000-2001 era. It send me a reminder that I was 1193 weeks late for my intro the supervision training course. Oops.

The setup was nice, but I wanted more space for my MP3 collection library, which together with my friend Mark we wrote a special website to index, display and play back these files. This needed the personal web server also.

I have a compact flash adapter PCMCIA card, which I plan to use for this, using a 64GB CF Card.

As before, this CF card uses FAT32 by default, so I need to format it before Windows NT 4 can use it.

The Softex PC Card controller software from the driver resource CD detects when I insert a PC card, and prompts me to configure the CF card to work with this system:

I then go to Disk Administrator to format the drive. As this is a removable disk, the drive letter is not so important. I was using this CF card for Amiga stuff before, so the partition map shows 32GB in use with a unknown partition.

I formatted the drive as NTFS and created one partition using the whole disk:

Now I have even more room.

I then took the CF card out of the PC card slot, and connected the CF to USB converter to the Windows 11 computer to copy my MP3 library from that era to it.

I then removed the Windows NT 4 CF card from the internal hard disk bay to image it on the Windows 11 PC for safe keeping.
This is where it all went wrong. The imaging process crashed out halfway, and rendered my CF card useless! I couldn't get it to be recognised in any computer! It was not detected by MacOS, Windows or Amiga. It was like the CF card just DIED.
All that work. For nothing. 
I was so angry. I put the whole lot in the cupboard and forgot about it for a few weeks.
I bought another 64GB CF card, and started over when I felt like trying again. I installed the 64GB CF card in the hard disk bay and checked it was detected from the BIOS - all good.
I won't bore you with the details of the rebuild, since it follows the same steps I already did.
I'll pick up from where I left off. 
By this stage I had received the Iomega Zip250 drive module for this laptop from the USA, which is what prompted me to have another go at building the machine. 
I want to use the Dell Latitude Zip 250 to help with data transfer to my Amiga systems, like the one I installed in the Amiga 4000T recently. 
I hope eventually to have a USB chip drive to connect to the Mac Studio or PC, but they are crazy expensive and so many don't work anymore and driver support is limited now. 
So this laptop is an intermediate machine that happily works with ZIP drives but can access modern local network shares to copy data I need to transfer!
After rebuilding the system the same as I did before, I installed the Zip drivers and applications, and installed the Zip250 drive module into the laptop.

To be honest, after the built-in Minidisc music drive with remote controller in the Vaio desktop I bought a few years ago, I didn't think I would be surprised by anything for computers of this era, but a Zip 250 drive for a PC laptop certainly did. It was the reason I chose this laptop.

The installation of the software went fine, and it detected the Zip250 drive module, which is great!

The Zip Drive icon appeared in My Computer, and I was ready to test it.

I have several PC formatted Zip disk (100MB) from one of the ZIP drives I bought previously, so it was easy to try out.

The zip drive does stick out a bit from the laptop form factor compared to the CD-ROM and floppy disk modules, but not too bad. 

I am pleased to say the Zip drive reads and writes zip disks well! Very happy.

With the recent work setting up Zip drives on my Amiga systems, this laptop will prove very useful for transferring data to those machines, since this machine is new enough that the PCCard CF card can be read/write from the Mac Studio and Windows 11 PC systems. I can then copy files to the Zip drive and read on the Amiga systems without network or USB access.

To complete the build, I installed some period correct games that work on Windows NT 4. 

I lost count of how many hours I spent playing Age of Empires 1 and Starcraft on my work laptop in hotels at night when travelling around Australia.

I know I can play the remastered Age of Empires on Steam using my modern PC too, but running it like this just *feels* right.

 I have done some work on this laptop to re-instate some personal websites to work on the web server, but these websites reveal more personal information than I want to share in this blog, so I will not show that here. I am happy it (mostly) worked as I had planned it though!

For now, this is where I will leave this build. I hope you found this interesting!

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