Because of differences in their respective registries and in hardware device support, no automatic upgrade path from Windows 95 to Windows NT Workstation currently exists. An upgrade path is planned for the next release of Windows NT Workstation.
You can manually upgrade from Windows 95 to Windows NT by installing Windows NT in a separate directory. No system or application settings will be migrated, and you will need to reinstall each application after Windows NT is installed. You should then delete the Windows 95 directory, although this step is optional.
A dual boot (giving the user a choice of operating systems on startup) is not recommended and is not supported. Windows NT does not support all the device drivers that Windows 95 does. A few Windows 95 device drivers require direct access the hardware, such as sound cards, video, scanners, hard disk, and so on. In Windows NT, only the Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) of the microkernel has access to the hardware. Where the application vendor has not provided the necessary driver for Windows NT, those device drivers aren't supported. Windows NT also does not support Virtual Device Drivers (VXDs), such as multimedia titles, games, and memory management applications.
Both Windows NT and Windows 95 support long filenames.
For more information about running a mixed environment including Windows NT and Windows 95 computers, see Chapter 4 "Planning For A Mixed Environment."