Rick Svyzek wrote in a message to Bill Dennison:
 RS> °§ I'd RUN (not walk) away from the Windows NT 3.1...  That
 RS> product has °§ seen its days,  and with Windows 4.0 on the
 RS> shelves,  5.0 around the °§ corner,  support for it will be
 RS> a challenge.
 RS>  I'm just working with what I got. I don't beleve in going out 
 RS> and  buying something becuse it's new and supost to be 
 RS> better.I've been  told from a few repair shops that with adding 
 RS> the win95 support it  caused major problems with version 4.  
 RS> I'm running a 486-33 and would rather run something for that 
 RS> class of machine.It's not a good sign when a company won't 
 RS> support an old version of a program. 
You must understand that newer releases of NT run faster and on less 
hardware. Because of heavy complaints about its performance, the internal 
architecture of NT has changed such that a certain amount of robustness has 
been traded off for increased performance.  Whether this is good or bad is a 
different issue, but the fact is that the decision was made and for clear 
reasons.
Almost all NT software requires at least 3.5 to run at all, and no one uses 
3.1 for anything.  There are a fair number of places still using 3.5 because 
they did not choose to migrate to 4.0, especially in the case of network 
servers where the user interface was essentially irrelevant.  However, 3.1 
was so universally reviled that anyone who could was eager to upgrade to 3.5.
The purpose of this echo is to discuss networking, not operating systems.  
However, I can't imagine that you would be happy with the results of trying 
to run NT -- any version, let alone the slowest (3.1) -- on a 33 MHz 486.  
That machine would be tolerable under OS/2 if you had at least 16 MB, or 
under Linux if you had at least 8 MB, but not under NT.
 
-- Mike
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