Hi, I hv encounter some problems with winnt3.51. 1. Icons not display in hight color in 16/32 bits colors. 2. Since Winnt3.51 and 4 does not come with defrag programs so I dic to use Win2000 to defrag the hdd (both 3.51 and 4).. after all the NT3.51 cannot boot up and the NT4 cannot cannot use it own check disk.

1. It cannot display true color icons. They can only be 16 colors. 2. NT 3.51 used an older version of the NTFS file system which did not support being defragmented. You may have corrupted it by defragmenting it with Windows 2000. You will probably have to reformat it and reinstall Windows.

You brought up some interesting points there. Since NT 3.51 uses a 3.1-like GUI, it should be able to display hi-color icons if these only contain the >=256 color versions (otherwise Windows will only use the standard 16 color icons). Maybe I'll try that once. Concerning the defrag issue, installing Win2k was not a good idea, since it uses a newer version of the NTFS file system (unofficially called NTFS 5.0), which can be understood by NT 4.0 with the latest service pack but not by 3.51. (During the installation Win2k converts NTFS v4 partitions to v5 ones.) On my (dual) Pentium box, I'm using O&O Defrag 2000 Free (v3.5) on NT 4.0, however, you need the MS Management Console 1.1 for that, and that one needs IE 4.0 or higher (the latest 4.0x I could grab from a CD was 4.01 SP1). I only found the MMC 1.2, which needs IE 5.0, a terrible resource hog that slows down Windows Explorer enormously on a slower Pentium. Fortunately O&O Defrag still works after uninstalling IE 5.0 and restoring 4.01 (and thus, Explorer's old speed). The lack of a defragmentation API is the flaw that annoyed me most about NT 3.51, but as a second OS next to 4.0 it's certainly not bad. Stephan