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...
> 
> 
>

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.
### Windows XP Mode

Quite a bit of older software will NOT run natively in Windows 7 or above. However, most of this software, whether DOS-based or older Windows software, will run just fine in [Windows XP Mode.](https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=8002)

Unfortunately, Windows XP Mode is not available for Windows 10. I have quite a few customers where I have stuck with Windows 7 specifically in order to run Windows XP Mode to run older software. Actually, most of them (and many of my other customers) prefer the "classic" Windows interface used from 95 through 7 to the newer 8/10 interface anyway, but I digress.

Other than the now very rare (for me at least) hardware issues requiring older systems to run properly, I have not had any significant problems getting the oldest software - including much that would quality as Retro (> 20 years old) running well in Windows XP Mode in Windows 7.