Are you sure this applies to laptops from back then? The minimal laptop that could run NT must have been so much worse than a desktop.

The min specs would be the same, laptop or desktop. A laptop with those kind of specs back then probably just had terrible battery life and was really big & heavy, didn't throttle down or anything. Not like today when you'd expect the "same part" or "same clock speed" to not really be the same, between a mobile and desktop chip.

IIRC laptops of that sort of era often used slower RAM, and laptop hard drives were generally _much_ slower than desktop ones.

(Also there was a period when a lot of laptops used non-Intel x86 implementations, which typically weren't very good. Cyrix, Via et al.)

In 1998, I exclusively used NT 4 on a Dell Latitude to do software development for a month while working overseas. It wasn’t super fast but it was comparable to a non-workstation desktop - in both cases you could not skimp on RAM but otherwise it was fine. The biggest gripe I had was the Synaptics touchpad, which is evergreen.