Denys P. Beauchemin
HICOMP
P.O. Box 2959
Spring TX 77383-2959
(281) 288-7438
Fax: (281) 355-6879
denys@hicomp.com
www.hicomp.com
This is not a good thing according to most pundits. Windows NT is not meant to be on the laptop, people should use the laptop friendly Windows 95 or especially Windows 98 and wait for NT 5.0 (AKA Windows 2000) before putting NT on the laptop. Windows NT does not do plug and play. Windows NT does not do power management. Windows NT doesn’t do . . .
Believe me, I have heard it all. I have even repeated some of the above, but not as an obstacle to NT on the laptop, rather as a reality check for people. The complete truth is Windows NT 4.0 works very well on the laptop, and in many cases it is much more preferable than a Windows 9x version.
My situation is such a case. I need Windows NT on my laptop.
I will explain what I do, why I need NT, what hardware I selected and how I implemented NT on it.
I am not a full-fledged road warrior, inasmuch as I do not travel every week, but I am out of the office a lot. In the past five years, I have traveled over 50,000 miles a year on airplanes. It is not a huge amount, but it means I am on a plane a couple of times a months. I sell and support software, backup software. Enterprise backup software. Our software runs on NT, UNIX, MPE and Novell. It allows a company to unify their backups for all their platforms under one umbrella. So I visit customers and prospects where I show our product. I also attend expositions and, as a vendor, I am in the booth showing the product to attendees. I also speak at users groups where I talk about NT, MPE, UNIX and enterprise backup.
I learned long ago, that whereas a picture is worth a thousand words, a live demonstration is worth an entire book. In the past, if I wanted to show our product in action, I would have to move Heaven and Earth to get the proper equipment ahead of time, at the customer site or at the booth. The logistics of this can become quite daunting for a small company when you have to do it every week. So I looked for a better way.
I have had a laptop with me since 1991. My first one was a Toshiba T-1000. I still have it, and it is still functional. My oldest daughter uses it now. It runs MS-DOS 3.3 and has 1.5 MB of RAM and a 20MB hard disk. It has a 2400 BAUD modem but the batteries no longer hold a charge. It was great for word processing and todo lists and agendas, but that was it. No Windows on that system.
The next laptop was a Compaq Contura 410CX. It was a 486/50 with an active matrix screen, a 330 MB disk and 4MB of RAM. I splurged and bought another 4MB of RAM. A few months after I bought it, I installed Windows 95 on it. Later on I swapped the 4MB for a 16MB board, bringing the total to 20MB. I started acquiring a veritable panoply of PC-cards. Modems, LAN cards, SCSI adapters and a portable SCSI CD-ROM with a multimedia card. I could not do meaningful demos on that system, tough I could show our GUI and give PowerPoint presentations, especially if it was attached to a projector or a data display.
The company had its first Windows product back in the early 1990s, but when Windows 95 came out, we had our 32 bit version ready. It is a tribute to Microsoft that what is developed on Windows NT will run on Windows 95, provided it follows certain rules. We are very good at multiple platform development and so we did on Windows what we had done previously on Unix via POSIX. Our software could run very nicely on both Windows 95 and Windows NT. At least the client portion could. A Hiback server needed to be either a Windows NT or a Unix box. So at this juncture, I could show our product on my laptop, but I needed to be either connected to a network which had a Hiback server or limit myself to the client capabilities.
I wanted to be able to show the whole product with equipment I could carry easily. This meant a Windows NT laptop, and the equipment compatible with it.
So, during the Summer of 1997, I started to look for a new laptop. After much searching and deliberation, I settled on a Compaq Armada 7750MT. There were several reasons to this choice. I will list them in order of importance to me.
1- NT Support. I checked the Compaq web site and it is replete with applets and extensions to make Windows NT very much at home in a laptop. This was of primary importance to me as it was the whole point of the exercise.
2- Easily swappable disk drives. Whilst several manufacturers have ways of doing this, I was especially impressed with the ease of swapping drives in the Armada. Incidentally, the included disk was a 2.1GB drive.
3- Integrated modem. I do not want to have to use a PC-card slot to dial out. I do use the 2 PC-card slots simultaneously at times, and I do not like having a power-sapping PC-card at all other times.
4- A good docking station. I was going to use this computer as my desktop replacement, so I needed a real docking station. The ArmadaStation is the best docking station I have ever seen.
5- Three spindle support (floppy, hard drive and CD-ROM) or bootable CD-ROM. This makes is easier to install Windows NT. The Armada has a bootable CD-ROM and using the ArmadaStation, it has three spindle support.
The other features of the Armada are pretty much the same as any other laptop, so long as they were there, I was happy. I like the feel of the keyboard, the pointing stick works well, but I usually have an external mouse with me, especially if I am going to do a lot of work. The screen is very nice on the 7750, and even though it is only a 12.1 inch screen, it runs at XGA resolution (1024X768.) Sure now there are bigger screens, but the 12.1 inch is more than adequate. Anyways, when I do a demo, the audience looks at a projected image or they pay attention to the backup hardware. More on this later on.
When I got the Armada, the 166MMX was the top of the line. How things have changed! However, for what I do, the need for a faster CPU has not become so pressing that I need to get a newer model. The 166MMX is very peppy and I gave it 64MB of RAM straightaway.
I got the Armada in September of 1997. Unfortunately I was faced with a series of trips and presentations, and I did not have the time to experiment and get things ready before the conference season was well underway. So I elected to leave Windows 95 OSR2 on the system and move my PowerPoint presentations and my e-mail, and all my other files to that system. I retired the Contura and did the season with the Armada on Windows 95. A few months later, I bought an ArmadaStation and I retired my desktop computer for good.
In January of 1998, I bought a 4GB disk drive for the Armada. There was a lull in the travel and the shows, and it was time to put together my NT laptop. I connected to the Compaq web site and downloaded all the NT extensions for the Armada. These extensions deal with:
Video support both internal and external
Audio support,
Multibay support for the CD-ROM and floppy drive and later the LS-120 and DVD-ROM
Hibernation support
Programmable keys support
NetFlex Ethernet drivers in the ArmadaStation
Security
PC-card support (Cardware)
Diagnostics
Integrated modem support
System management
Power management
A small registry update
I also brought my BIOS up to date on both the Armada and the ArmadaStation. I took the opportunity to upgrade my Windows 95 installation with the latest versions of the Compaq extensions for Windows 95. I created and labeled diskettes for all the above extensions. I also got the latest versions of the NT drivers for my Xircom 10/100 LAN adapter and for the Adaptec AHA-1460a SCSI adapter. These drivers were also placed on diskettes.
I swapped the hard disk drives installing the 4GB disk drive. I fired up the system with the F10 Setup diskette and let it carve out a 12MB partition on the disk drive. It then loaded the diagnostics program in that partition. I then loaded Windows NT workstation. Compaq has since produced a very nice and complete white paper on Windows NT installation on a Compaq notebook. You can find it at ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/supportinformation/papers/na115a0598.pdf. Since there are detailed instructions on how to do this in the white paper, I will not go into detail on how I installed NT on my notebook. The only difference is that I did not install Cardware. I use profiles instead. The reason is that I did not have Cardware at the time, and now that I have downloaded the software, I find that my method of working suits my hardware and me very well, as one would expect. I may decide to use Cardware to get support for the Cardbus SCSI support.
When I finished installing NT, I had 2 disk drives, one with Windows NT and one with Windows 95 OSR2. This gave me the flexibility I need, so that if I ever have a problem with a device on Windows NT, I can always swap out the disk and boot Windows 95 and use it’s plug and play features. This has not occurred yet.
At that time, I went into the System applet of the control panel and in the Hardware Profiles tab, I first renamed the profile to ‘Undocked” and copied it to create a new profile called “Docked”. In this new profile, I disabled the Xircom Ethernet device in the Devices applet. I brought the system down, placed the notebook in the docking station and powered it on. After NT loader came up, a new menu is displayed. It asks which profile you want to use. I selected the docked profile and brought the system up. I went into the control panel Network applet and added the Netflex 3 adapter from the docking station, by using the Have Disk in the Add window.
So now, I had two profiles, one docked and one undocked. I wanted to create more profiles and refine the existing ones. For example, I disabled the programmable keys applet in the Docked profiles as I could not use the keys anyways since I was using an external keyboard and mouse. I copied the docked profile to create a new profile, docked with SCSI card. Before rebooting though, I made sure to add the registry update listed earlier to ensure there would be no conflict between the PC cards.
I then rebooted with that profile and the Adaptec SCSI card installed. Once the system was up, I added the SCSI controller via the control panel SCSI Adapters applet. Finally, I added the device I wanted to use for my demonstrations, an HP 48L SureStore 6 tape DDS-2 autoloader. I then rebooted with the SCSI card inserted and the autoloader powered on and installed the drivers. The Hicomp CD-ROM contains the required drivers, and I installed them via the control panel Tape Devices applet. This added two devices, the 4mm DAT drive and the HP1553 driver for the robotic device.
I now had 3 profiles: Docked, Undocked and Undocked with the SCSI card and the autoloader. From this point on, it was easy to create as many profiles as I needed. I copied the Docked profile and then enabled the SCSI card, 4mm DAT and Changer drivers in that profile. I called this profile the “Docked w/ SCSI” profile. I also created an “Undocked” profile without any network or SCSI cards. For this I renamed the Undocked profile to “Undocked w/ NIC” and copied it to “Undocked”. In the Undocked profile, I disabled every network service and the Xircom 10/100 devices. I copied the “Undocked w/ SCSI” profile to “Undocked w/NIC & w/ SCSI” profile and subsequently disabled the network services and network card in the Undocked w/SCSI” profile.
This left me with 6 profiles, 2 docked and 4 undocked:
Docked (has network support)
Undocked (has no PC-card support, no network and no SCSI devices like on the plane)
Docked w/ SCSI
Undocked w/ NIC
Undocked w/ SCSI
Undocked w/ NIC & SCSI card
When I boot my notebook, I select the appropriate profile depending on the setup. The final adjustments I made involved going into the control panel Services applet and verifying the services in each of the hardware profiles.
Recently, I was giving a demonstration of our backup product to a very large prospect. I put in the SCSI and the Xircom 10/100 cards and selected the Undocked w/ NIC & SCSI profile. I was able to connect to their internal network and give a multimedia presentation and demo to a large audience as I was connected to an XGA projector. I also connected a pair of speakers to provide better sound. Finally, I used my external mouse during the demo. With this setup, I was able to demonstrate our product used as a backup server for one of their systems, providing backup to the DDS autoloader connected to the laptop. Something I would never have been able to do with Windows 95 or Windows 98. The prospect, now customer, was impressed.
When I travel, I bring along my Windows 95 HDD. In case anything happens and I can’t use Windows NT for one reason or another, I simply swap disks and I am up and running with Windows 95. At the beginning, I have had to do this a few times, especially dealing with the modem setup for hotels or in other countries. More recently however, I have been able to handle all situations with Windows NT. This includes the modem issues. It was a matter of learning RAS more completely. Now, I have a list of modem setups so that I can dial my ISP either directly of from a hotel room using a calling card.
The problem having two disks is that you need to have a mechanism to transfer files between the disks. The Armada has a hard disk adapter which allows you to have both disk drives in the laptop simultaneously. My NT disk is running NTFS so I must boot NT with the Windows 95 disk in the multibay in order to have access to both disks. I have a used a floppy to transfer files, or when I am in the office I can also use the network server as a temporary holding area.
Recently, I have replaced my floppy disk drive with an LS-120 drive. This gives me lots of room to move files between the two disks, and I also have created a more complete recovery diskette for both systems. I have not had to use these diskettes so far.
Late last year, I came to the realization that the Notebook was slow. I started to consider replacing it with a newer model. Then I remembered that I only had 64 MB of RAM. The maximum capacity is 144MB, so I ordered 2 64MB modules replacing the 16MB and 32MB modules already in the machine and got the memory to the maximum 144 MB. The difference was incredible. It was like getting a whole new machine. NT really loves a lot of memory.
Compaq has recently released a DVD-ROM for the Armada multibay, so even though the laptop is seriously aged, I can still keep it up to date. I also have a Palm III organizer and a Rex card. These two devices connect to NT using the serial connection, however, I cannot use the Rex card as a PC-card under NT.
The feature I like the most about my laptop, and which I still consider a big differentiator is the removable disk drive. I can safely swap disk drives, and OS, in 3 seconds. In May of this year, I acquired yet another 4 GB disk drive and loaded Linux on it, but that is another story. I also resurrected an old 1GB disk drive and loaded Windows NT 5.0 Beta on it. So now I have 4 disks and 4 different OS.
In conclusion, you can see it is very possible to use Windows NT 4.0 in a laptop. If you want the security and reliability of NT on your laptop, do not hesitate, load NT on it. Before you do however, collect all the information and the software you will need. Since I started with NT on the laptop almost 2 years ago, several other manufacturers have reached a much better NT support level than they previously had. Among these companies is Hewlett-Packard. Their more recent OmniBook are now fully NT compliant.