For me the frustrations with NT 4.0 are all the reboots associated with changing settings, and the lack of plug 'n play (for USB devices). Those things aside it runs well.

Windows 2000 gets you a lot of quality-of-life improvements w/ a tremendous amount of bloat.

re: uptime - I've seen NT 4.0 machines w/ multi-year uptimes. I actually saw one running Microsoft Exchange w/ a >2 year uptime. I was shocked.

Older versions of Windows allowed domain join in the OOBE. It was handy.

The shop I worked for, back in the day, got some of the technicians parallel ZIP drives. It was a godsend to copy the Windows 95 CAB files to the hard disk drive from the ZIP drive and run the upgrade from there, versus feeding the machine floppies.

If you were really luck you were working in a site w/ Novell Netware and you could just copy the CAB files down from the Netware server. >smile<

Update on this machine: After applying all pending updates to-date it has remained clean and runs about 2.7GB memory used at the desktop with nothing foreground open. While that offends my sensibilities in the general sense (remembering running Linux w/ X and Netscape in 8MB of RAM, or Windows XP in 128MB) that doesn't seem bad for what it is.

Installing AIX PS/2 v1.3 on a 486