Although Microsoft Corp claims the Server and Workstation versions of Windows NT are designed differently and specifically tuned for different tasks, Sebastopol, California publishing and software development company O’Reilly & Associates says only two simple changes to Windows NT’s Registry, where configuration information is stored are needed to change an NT Workstation to an NT Server. A senior editor at O’Reilly told PC Week that one of his colleagues discovered that a single undocumented but easily accessible Registry setting was all that separated the Server and Workstation versions of Windows NT 3.51; in 4.0, two registry settings are needed, and Microsoft went to some effort to hide the settings. The only other differences between Workstation and Server are the bundled programs, such as Internet Information Server, a Domain Naming System administration tool, and utilities for managing NT networks. When PC Week Labs ran the utility written by O’Reilly & Associates to change the settings on Windows NT Workstation 4.0, the system put up a dialog box that warned The system has detected tampering with your registered product type; this is a violation of your software license – tampering with product type is not permitted. When you make the change, Workstation reboots as server, and perormance limitations of the former are found to have all miraculously vanished.
