Windows NT 4.0: Microsoft-тың бизнеске бағытталған операциялық жүйесі

Fourth major release of Windows NT, released in 1996

Windows NT 4.0 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 3.51, and was released to manufacturing on July 31, 1996, 32 bit operating system that is designed to work with either uniprocessor or symmetric multi processor computers. It was Microsoft's primary business oriented operating system until the introduction of Windows 2000. Workstation, server and embedded editions were sold, and all editions feature a graphical user interface similar to that of Windows 95. Windows NT 4.0 was the last public release of Windows for the Alpha, MIPS, and PowerPC architectures. Mainstream support for Windows NT 4.0 Workstation ended on June 30, 2002, following by extended support ending on June 30, 2004. Windows NT 4.0 Server mainstream support ended on December 31, 2002, with extended support ending on December 31, 2004. Windows NT 4.0 Embedded mainstream support ended on June 30, 2003, followed by extended support on July 11, 2006, with Windows 98 and Windows Me ending support on that date as well. These editions were succeeded by Windows 2000 Professional, the Windows 2000 Server Family and Windows XP Embedded, respectively.

The successor to Windows NT 3.51, Windows NT 4.0 introduced the user interface of Windows 95 to the Windows NT family, including the Windows shell, File Explorer (known as Windows NT Explorer at the time), and the use of "My" nomenclature for shell folders (e. g. My Computer). It also includes most components introduced with Windows 95. Internally, Windows NT 4.0 was known as the Shell Update Release (SUR). While many administrative tools, notably User Manager for Domains, Server Manager and Domain Name Service Manager still used the old graphical user interfaces, the Start menu in Windows NT 4.0 separated the per user shortcuts and folders from the shared shortcuts and folders by a separator line. Windows NT 4.0 includes some enhancements from Microsoft Plus! for Windows 95 such as the Space Cadet pinball table, font smoothing, showing window contents while dragging, high color icons and stretching the wallpaper to fit the screen. Windows Desktop Update could also be installed on Windows NT 4.0 to update the shell version and install Task Scheduler. Windows NT 4.0 Resource Kit included the Desktop Themes utility. Windows NT 4.0 is the last major release of Microsoft Windows to support the Alpha, MIPS or PowerPC CPU architectures as Windows 2000 runs solely on IA 32 only. It remained in use by businesses for a number of years, despite Microsoft's many efforts to get customers to upgrade to Windows 2000 and newer versions. It was also the last release in the Windows NT family to be branded as Windows NT although Windows 2000 carried the designation "Built on NT Technology".

Windows NT 4.0, like previous versions of Windows NT before it and versions after it, is a fully 32 bit OS, while Windows 95 is a 16/32 bit hybrid OS. While providing much greater stability than Windows 95, Windows NT 4.0 was less flexible from a desktop perspective. Much of the stability was gained through the use of protected memory and the hardware abstraction layer. Direct hardware access was disallowed and "misbehaving" programs were terminated without needing the computer to be restarted. The trade off was that NT required much more 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 run on Windows NT, many 3D games would not, partly because of limited DirectX support for Windows NT 4.0. Third party device drivers were an alternative to access the hardware directly, but poorly written drivers became a frequent source of the infamous error known as the Blue Screen of Death (BSoD) that would require the system to be restarted. In spite of shipping a year later than Windows 95, by default there is no Legacy Plug and Play support and no Device Manager on Windows NT 4.0, which greatly simplifies installation of hardware devices (although limited support could be installed later). Many basic DOS programs would run; however, graphical DOS programs would not run because of the way they accessed graphics hardware. Although Windows NT 4.0 introduced an application programming interface (API) for defragmentation, AGP support can be added with SP3 or later. Large disk (> 8 GB) support can be added with SP4 or later. FAT32 is not officially supported by Windows NT 4.0. The difference between the NT family and 9x family would remain until the release of Windows XP in 2001. At that time, the APIs — such as OpenGL and DirectX — had matured sufficiently to be more efficient to write for common PC hardware, and the hardware itself had become powerful enough to handle the API processing overhead. The maximum amount of supported physical random access memory (RAM) in Windows NT 4.0 is 4 GB, which is the maximum possible for a 32 bit operating system that does not support PAE. By comparison, Windows 95 fails to boot on computers with more than approximately 480 MB of memory. Like previous versions of NT, version 4.0 can run on multiple processor architectures. Windows 95, however, can only run on x86.

Windows NT 4.0 Server was included in versions 4.0 and 4.5 of BackOffice Small Business Server suite.

Windows NT 4.0 Workstation was designed for use as the general business desktop operating system.

Windows NT 4.0 Server, released in 1996, was designed for small scale business server systems. The Enterprise Edition saw the introduction of the boot flag, which changed the default virtual address space mapping from 2 GB kernel and 2 GB user space to 1 GB kernel and 3 GB userland. This version also sees the first introduction of cluster service. Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, (known as Windows based Terminal Server 4.0 and Windows Terminal Server 4.0 in beta builds) released on June 16, 1998, allows the users to log on remotely. The same functionality was called Terminal Services in Windows 2000 and later server releases, and also powers the Remote Desktop feature that first appeared in Windows XP and later versions of Windows. Windows NT 4.0 Terminal Server Edition, like Windows NT 4.0 Server, Enterprise Edition, includes Service Pack 3.

Windows NT 4.0 Embedded (abbreviated NTe) is an edition of Windows NT 4.0 that was aimed at computer powered major appliances, vending machines, ATMs and other devices that cannot be considered general purpose computers per se. It is the same system as the standard Windows NT 4.0, but it comes packaged in a database of components and dependencies, from which a developer can choose individual components to build customized setup CDs and hard disk boot images. Windows NT 4.0 Embedded includes Service Pack 5. It was succeeded by Windows XP Embedded. Microsoft ended mainstream support for Windows NT 4.0 Embedded on June 30, 2003, and received three years of extended support, which means that support for Windows NT 4.0 Embedded ended on the same day support for Windows 98 and Windows Me ended on July 11, 2006.

An Option Pack was available as a free bundled CD starting around 1998, which included IIS 4.0 with Active Server Pages, FrontPage Server Extensions, Certificate Server, MTS, MSMQ, CDONTS, Internet Authentication Service (IAS), Indexing Service, Microsoft Management Console 1.0, Microsoft Site Server, SMTP and NNTP services and other new software. It is the only Option Pack to be released, as most of its features have been integrated into Windows 2000. Several features such as Distributed File System and Windows NT Load Balancing Service (WLBS) were delivered as addons for Windows NT Server 4.0. The Routing and Remote Access Service was also a downloadable feature which replaced Windows NT 4.0's separate RAS and Multi Protocol Routing services. The last version of Microsoft Office to be compatible with Windows NT 4.0 is Office XP. Similarly, Windows Media Player 7.0 (which was released in June 2000) and DirectX 3.0a (which was released in December 1996) are the last versions of Windows Media Player and DirectX available for Windows NT 4.0, respectively. The last versions of NET Framework and Windows Installer available for Windows NT 4.0 are NET Framework 1.1 (released in April 2003) and Windows Installer 2.0 (released in September 2001), respectively. The last version of Internet Explorer supported on Windows NT 4.0 is Internet Explorer 6 with SP1, which was released in September 2002 (Service Pack 6 or 6a is required). Windows NT 4.0 was succeeded by Windows 2000, which also included the Windows Desktop Update and Internet Explorer 5 by default. It also could be directly upgraded to Windows XP Professional on IA 32 based systems only.

Microsoft released five revisions of the Windows NT 4.0 Workstation and Server Resource Kit (original release plus four supplements) which contained a large number of tools and utilities, such as desktops. exe which allowed the user to have multiple desktops, as well as third party software.

Microsoft stopped providing security updates for Windows NT 4.0 Workstation on June 30, 2004, Windows NT 4.0 Server on December 31, 2004, and Windows NT 4.0 Embedded on July 11, 2006, due to major security flaws including Microsoft Security Bulletin MS03 010, which according to Microsoft could not be patched without significant changes to the core operating system. According to the security bulletin, "Due to the fundamental differences between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows 2000 and its successors, it is infeasible to rebuild the software for Windows NT 4.0 to eliminate the vulnerability. To do so would require re architecting a very significant amount of the Windows NT 4.0 operating system, and there would be no assurance that applications designed to run on Windows NT 4.0 would continue to operate on the patched system." Between June 2003 and June 2007, 127 security flaws were identified and patched in Windows 2000 Server, many of which may also affect Windows NT 4.0 Server; however, Microsoft does not test security bulletins against unsupported software.