NT is it secure (Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0)

Member Name: smw

Product:	Microsoft Windows NT Workstation 4.0
Date:	13/08/00 (105 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reliable, Remote Administration

Disadvantages: Belief it’s secure

You'll not find many home computers with NT 4 installed on them, mainly due to the fact Win 98 is the cheaper option for the PC Manufactures. A real bonus over Win98 is that you cannot get direct access to the hardware. By disabling the direct hardware access a lot of viruses will not run correctly making it more secure from the word go. Also having a file system that does not require constant file re-ordering, has to be a giant step forward.

The real use for NT Workstation is for Business. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for many businesses is greatly reduced because of remote administration. TCO is one of the many factors in buying business machine. The better the uptime the more money can be made in theory. The uptime is not the only thing that effects TCO. By allowing administrators access to everything they can support machine with no boundaries of location. The effort in installing NT can also be reduced by using zero administration kit (ZAK) to basically allow for very automated installations.

The standard installation may, look and feel secure but is rather quite the opposite. The administrator account can be forced hacked because it will never lock out. Real secure! This can almost be over come by renaming it to something very obscure, and giving it a password that has at least 10 characters with a mix of alphanumeric and mixed case. The more horrible the password the better. Another major security hole for NT is the ‘everyone’ group. This does mean everyone, not just members of your workgroup or domain. If at all possible remove this account from everywhere that you see it. This has to be one of the major security holes that NT comes with.

Overall NT is far better in handling ever day tasks than Win98. The game side of thing is rather poor, but you can get some games that will run on it. The other thing required to run it well is at least 64MB of ram the more ram you give it the better. These are just a few poi
nters in hopefully the right direction. I will not waffle on about NT registry or policies and profiles since the average your will never want to no about them, and you can do a lot of damage to both windows 98 and more so NT if you don’t know what you are doing with them.

I will say though I am a convert to NT and will us it rather than 98 due to the fact it is more reliable, and being on the internet does give you slightly more resilience from the outside world, but not much.

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