[ Tech stuff | NT ]

Making NT More Usable - Tips

This page is grossly outdated. Like, circa 2001 or so, if that late. Please don't contact me for support on the stuff here. I haven't touched Windows NT for almost ten years.

The following are some of the things that I do on my NT machines to make them work a little better.

Scheduled reboots

Yes, I know, some folks have their NT machines up for months at a time. I do occasionally. But I just find that they perform better when they are rebooted every now and then. The trick is finding a good time to reboot, when it won't interfere with anyone's work. This is especially hard with an international company. I find that 3am on Sunday (Eastern Time) is a good time, because, if it is 3am Sunday Eastern, nobody in the world is working. The trick is doing this reboot without getting up and doing it yourself. With either WinAT from the NT Resource Kit or cron from AINTX (see the Tools section above) you can schedule a shutdown. There are two ways to do this. One, with Perl ...: 
perl -MWin32::AdminMisc -e "Win32::AdminMisc::ExitWindows(EWX_REBOOT|EWX_FORCE);"
Or, with the AINTX tools, 
shutdown -rf
I prefer the Perl way, just because I'm a Perl nut. Also, it does it immediately, while the AINTX version starts a 1 minute timer, just in case someone is at the console, it gives them a chance to finish what they're doing.

Shorten the OS Loader timeout

When rebooting NT, you get that message on the screen that allows you to choose from the various Operating Systems that you have installed on your machine. For most of us, the choice is NT, or NT in VGA mode. Boot pauses on this screen for 20 seconds, or until you press return, whichever is first.
You can shorten this timeout by editing the file boot.ini, which is located in the root of c:\ This file is read-only, so you will have to modify its permissions before you can change it. Edit tie file by double-clicking on the file name in Explorer. It will look something like: 
[boot loader]
timeout=20
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Server Version 4.00" 
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINNT="Windows NT Server Version 4.00
[VGA mode]" /basevideo /sos
If you have a multi-boot system, there may be more options listed there. You can change the timeout value to anything. It's a good idea to have it a few seconds or more, just in case you need to boot to VGA mode - like if your video driver flakes out. I find that 5 seconds is long enough.

Take the "best of breed" approach

This is more of a philosophy thing than a concrete suggestion. Microsoft wants you to use Microsoft products. That makes sense. They want to make money. But for you, the user, it makes sense to use what works. So, on the one hand, you have MS products that are made (presumably) to interoperate seamlessly with other MS products. On the other hand, there are some of these MS products that just are not the best available.

For example, MS SQL server is the best database server for NT (again, in my opinion). SQL Server 6.5 was great, and SQL Server 7.0 was an enormous improvement. I was truly impressed.

On the flip side, IIS is perhaps the worst web server available for NT. It is slow, cumbersome, and contains all sorts of "value added" features that seem to add overhead, but no real value.

So, I put Apache on my NT machines, and I use SQL Server 7.0 for my data. I use "tera term" instead of the native NT telnet client, because it works the way that I think a telnet client should work. I use the FTP server that is part of IIS, because it is simple and lightweight, and just does FTP. I use Perl for administrative tasks, even when there is a MS tool to do said tasks, because it is simpler, and more configurable.

This is the "best of breed" approach. Find the tool that does the job best and use it until you find another tool that does the job better. Yes, it takes more work to find these tools, but the work saved by having a better tool more than makes up for this.