Question: Have an old(ish) laptop with a Pentium T4400 @ 2.20 GHz processor, and some old software1 that requires Windows 95 or NT.

With a view to running this software on that hardware, I tried installing Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and NT from CD-ROM with no success whatsoever.

Can it be a configuration problem? Which is the latest processor I can use for this software?

IIRC, Windows 98 & ME are versions of 95, and 2000 is a version of NT? Later Windows versions are more different?

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1 The software in question, which does not run on Windows 7 or 10, is [Nationalencyklopedin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationalencyklopedin):

> 
> In 1997, the first digital form of the encyclopedia was released on 6 CD-ROMs...
> 
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>

Answer: 
Windows 2000 is the latest (5.0) version of NT. Last Update was 2005, EOL in 2010. The Laptop isn't anywhere near being old (or OT here), as its at maximum from 2010. While this seem late, it should be possible to install Win2k, update it to SP4 and include drivers for the Laptop from XP, as the original XP driver model is still compatible with NT/Win2k.

Then again, without more information why installation failed, it's hard to even randomly guess why it doesn't work.

Further, software made for NT should, in most cases, run on XP and even Windows 10. Of course, depending on what OS services it uses. So again, without a more detailed information about it's impossible to give a real answer.
> 
> IIRC, Windows 98 & ME are versions of 95, and 2000 is a version of NT? Later Windows versions are more different?
> 
> 
> 

All modern windows is based on the "NT line", but of course it has evolved over the years and sometimes things break.

IIRC in terms of windows system stuff NT4->2K was a pretty big change, 2K->XP was realtively minor, XP->Vista was a big change and Vista->7->8->10 were again relatively minor.

> 
> Can it be a configuration problem? Which is the latest processor I can use for this software?
> 
> 
> 

It's not so much about the processor as about the whole system. PCs aren't fundamentally all that different from they were in the 2000s, but there are enough little things that can make getting older OS's to run on newer hardware difficult or impossible.

It's worth trying windows XP if you haven't already. It might be old enough for your software to run, while being new enough for the rest of your hardware.

It's also worth setting the SATA mode to "legacy" in the BIOS.

Failing that it is worth considering virtualisation, virtualisation tools (virtualbox, vmware etc) often get on better with older operating systems than real hardware does.