Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

[TELVM]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^ I wholly agree with your post Mockingbird.

... I see no need for these pointless end of the world doomsday XP EOL Support threads ...

Here's the reason for the current XP FUDfest:

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

I don't care how you put it, Windows XP is Windows XP, and anything that came after it -- isn't Windows XP. Windows XP in itself was barely tolerable over Windows 2000, so I consider your post to be self-rationalization rather than describing a legitimate a method of adaptation.

Did you forget your meds this morning? Self rationalizing what?! I dumped an OS and moved to anotehr one.... What is there to rationalize? FWIW, S2K8 in classic shell functions virtually the same as XP. Very trivial differences, and I'm every bit as proficient with it.

In fact, I turn off indexing on all my Windows 7 machines to minimize unecessary HDD seeking).

As do I. I know where my stuff is, I cant tell you the last time I had to search a HDD for anything.

Furthermore, I see no need for these pointless end of the world doomsday XP EOL Support threads.

I see no need for a lot of the off the wall things you post either....this post sure comes to mind. If you didn't see the need, you simply shouldn't have clicked on it.

Finally, even if XP is no longer receiving security updates, it doesn't render the OS not functional. As long as you're behind some sort of firewall and you have a basic background monitoring antivirus, you're safe.

Win2k within months of EOL was falling apart at the seams.....believe me, I know....I had win2k servers going. Can't hide a web server behind routers and firewalls....You can lock them down tight, but I still had issues. I think XP will hang on a little longer than win2k did after EOL....but its demise is eminent.... I've always been a staunch XP fan....

For office use, nothing beats Windows XP + Office 2003. Windows Vista and its derivatives shine on particular types of systems but they are not meant for office use, period.

I tend to agree with that. As I said earlier, XP was the last of the greats for workstations......I still use office 2003.... ...but I have no trouble proficiently navigating any classic shell or even an aero version of vista or 7. The views can be set the same as XP....so really?! What's so "counterproductive"? It's not....that's just your opinion blazing out....now windows 8/8.1 on the other hand, you're 100% correct.

[mockingbird]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

Did you forget your meds this morning? Self rationalizing what?! I dumped an OS and moved to anotehr one.... What is there to rationalize? FWIW, S2K8 in classic shell functions virtually the same as XP. Very trivial differences, and I'm every bit as proficient with it.

I was sensing some buyers rationalization which is a phenomon where someone justifies a purchase even if the purchase was in error. True, you may have not paid for it, but you did invest time in getting it up and running.

As do I. I know where my stuff is, I cant tell you the last time I had to search a HDD for anything.

Don't minimize. The Windows XP search is very useful, especially for finding text within documents... Yes, I'm sure there's third-party software that can do this, but that's not the point. Subsequent search implementations in later Windows versions are a downgrade, plain and simple. I don't mind at all that you made the upgrade, in fact, sometimes people need to see a UI update for psychological reasons... But my point is that all any Vista iteration update is (for office tasks), is a UI update.

I see no need for a lot of the off the wall things you post either....this post sure comes to mind. If you didn't see the need, you simply shouldn't have clicked on it.

Since when do I have to walk on eggshells around you? I thought Italians had thick skin.

Win2k within months of EOL was falling apart at the seams.....believe me, I know....I had win2k servers going. Can't hide a web server behind routers and firewalls.... I think XP will hang on a little longer than win2k did after EOL....but its demise is eminent.... I've always been a staunch XP fan....

I agree with you about Win2K, people who use it are coocoo, but in a good way. I kind of admire that hacks that are still being implemented for Win2K.

I tend to agree with that. As I said earlier, XP was the last of the greats for workstations......I still use office 2003.... ...but I have no trouble proficiently navigating any classic shell or even an aero version of vista or 7. The views can be set the same as XP....so really?! What's so "counterproductive"? It's not....that's just your opinion blazing out....now windows 8/8.1 on the other hand, you're 100% correct.

Oh, nothing in particular, just a bunch of small things here and there that irritate after a while... It's like Dana Carvey used to joke about the plastic wrapper of CD jewel cases, how some Nazi was sitting in the production facility uttering to himself "Smoother, it must be smoother"... The Windows XP UI was the culmination of 20 years of user input and rational decisions to make the interface intuitive. It's as if someone sat somewhere in MS headquarters and planned the new UI with the basis of making everything more frustrating... Either that, or it was designed by a woman.

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

I was sensing some buyers rationalization which is a phenomon where someone justifies a purchase even if the purchase was in error. True, you may have not paid for it, but you did invest time in getting it up and running.

Nah, I dont really agree with that. I see 'buyers remorse' when someone buys a new car, and when the payment start, they regret it.... I "beta tested" S2K8 on a useless system before I put it on anything mainstream, just for the reasons you mentioned....to make sure it was going to be worth messing with any further. My office machine has Server 2003 on it with office 2003. Very good combo and not going anywhere... It also allows me to keep a little intranet web/database setup running.

Don't minimize. The Windows XP search is very useful, especially for finding text within documents... Yes, I'm sure there's third-party software that can do this, but that's not the point. Subsequent search implementations in later Windows versions are a downgrade, plain and simple. I don't mind at all that you made the upgrade, in fact, sometimes people need to see a UI update for psychological reasons... But my point is that all any Vista iteration update is (for office tasks), is a UI update.

I've never used Vista in its native form on anything of mine. I've set it up for people, but that's all. S2K8 has none of the eye candy stuff initially....100% classic shell upon install with their modified toolbar, which is a couple clicks to have it back to normal. I've set up hundreds of 7 machines, aero manipulation is second nature to me now...but on that note, the default winXP 'theme' is horrendous!!! The first thing I do is set it to classic shell, which makes it look like windows95.......so yea, I'll gladly take Aero over the stock XP theme....but that said, and as I said before, XP was and still is the last of teh greats.....but nothing lasts forever....and with S2K8 carved into a nice workstation on a few machines, I don't miss XP....and from me, that's saying a lot!!

Since when do I have to walk on eggshells around you? I thought Italians had thick skin.

Ohh, you don't, not at all....just making a point, which I clearly made. Nothing personal and no hard feelings.

I agree with you about Win2K, people who use it are coocoo, but in a good way. I kind of admire that hacks that are still being implemented for Win2K.

If Win2k had a 64 bit version for other than Itanium, I'd have probably kept more interest in it....but when XP came out, I jumped on it and never looked back....but I did wait for XP SP1, as you know how buggy the initial RTM of any version of Windows is...

Oh, nothing in particular, just a bunch of small things here and there that irritate after a while... It's like Dana Carvey used to joke about the plastic wrapper of CD jewel cases, how some Nazi was sitting in the production facility uttering to himself "Smoother, it must be smoother"... The Windows XP UI was the culmination of 20 years of user input and rational decisions to make the interface intuitive. It's as if someone sat somewhere in MS headquarters and planned the new UI with the basis of making everything more frustrating... Either that, or it was designed by a woman.

When I read this, the first thing I thought was a woman MS employee on PMS that was just dumped by her lesbian lover comes to mind....and her retaliation was the Metro design and windows 8/8.1...

I do not think this thread was 'useless', and this thread proves it:
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=35549

The XP demographic wasn't as high as I thought it would be, while the Win8/8.1 number is much lower than I thought it would be..... This poll a year ago would have been very lopsided in favor of XP.....

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

Nah, I dont really agree with that. I see 'buyers remorse' when someone buys a new car, and when the payment start, they regret it.... I "beta tested" S2K8 on a useless system before I put it on anything mainstream, just for the reasons you mentioned....to make sure it was going to be worth messing with any further. My office machine has Server 2003 on it with office 2003. Very good combo and not going anywhere... It also allows me to keep a little intranet web/database setup running.

I've never used Vista in its native form on anything of mine. I've set it up for people, but that's all. S2K8 has none of the eye candy stuff initially....100% classic shell upon install with their modified toolbar, which is a couple clicks to have it back to normal. I've set up hundreds of 7 machines, aero manipulation is second nature to me now...but on that note, the default winXP 'theme' is horrendous!!! The first thing I do is set it to classic shell, which makes it look like windows95.......so yea, I'll gladly take Aero over the stock XP theme....but that said, and as I said before, XP was and still is the last of teh greats.....but nothing lasts forever....and with S2K8 carved into a nice workstation on a few machines, I don't miss XP....and from me, that's saying a lot!!

Ohh, you don't, not at all....just making a point, which I clearly made. Nothing personal and no hard feelings.

If Win2k had a 64 bit version for other than Itanium, I'd have probably kept more interest in it....but when XP came out, I jumped on it and never looked back....but I did wait for XP SP1, as you know how buggy the initial RTM of any version of Windows is...

XP SP0 was annoying! It was the one with the notorious "has recovered from a serious error" bug, where if it crashed once, Windows XP then kept giving that pop-up on every boot, even when it didn't crash again.

Microsoft actually had a hotfix for SP0, to fix that...

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

This is just a fringe benefit it seems....but I am an old school Age of Empires player.....yea, AoE1... Even on a powerful system, this very system, the game would become choppy under a lot of activity.....and getting it to smooth out would involve pausing it, waiting a few seconds, unpausing it and hoping it smoothed out...if it didn't, repeat. The game has always done this all the way back to the win95 days. I've noticed that this has not been an issue since since the changeover.....and I've played more than a few intense games that would have choked it on XP, w2k, and older....smooth as a baby's ass now....go figure, same hardware, just newer OS....

[TELVM]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^ Battling several AIs in single player heavily taxes the only single core good ole AoE can use, even powerful modern CPUs get a run for their money. In AoK-TC the worse of the lag occurs when there are lots of trebuchets operating simultaneously.

A trick that helps is to change processor affinity by right clicking the process in Task Manager => set affinity, and unticking the usually more overloaded CPU 0 core.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

XP serves all the basic needs, whereas later Windows versions lack basic features found in previous versions such as a basic on-demand search GUI (Indexed searches doesn't count, it's practically worthless. In fact, I turn off indexing on all my Windows 7 machines to minimize unecessary HDD seeking).

As do I. I know where my stuff is, I cant tell you the last time I had to search a HDD for anything.

Don't minimize. The Windows XP search is very useful, especially for finding text within documents... Yes, I'm sure there's third-party software that can do this, but that's not the point. Subsequent search implementations in later Windows versions are a downgrade, plain and simple. I don't mind at all that you made the upgrade, in fact, sometimes people need to see a UI update for psychological reasons... But my point is that all any Vista iteration update is (for office tasks), is a UI update.

I beg to differ, and will sound schizophrenic in doing so if you see who wrote this article: http://www.techspot.com/article/596-...retrogression/

Yes, search in Windows has been getting worse in every version of Windows, the GUI has become confusing & the search context moreso.

Having said that I must say that I do love the indexed search in Windows 7.
Just like Topcat I know where everything is on my filesystem.
But unlike him I often use search to find it.
Because it's so much quicker than traversing a directory hierarchy or start-menu.
Simply press the windows key, type a few letters, press enter and bam: there is the thing you wanted. Takes a split second at most!

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

For grins, I tossed S2K8 on the slowest/crappiest system in my fleet, and that was an Acer netbook (one of the originals back from 08 that came with XP Home), has a 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1gb RAM that's not upgradeable as far as I know. All I use this mahcine for is car diagnostics.....so what the hell. I'm surprised how well it runs. With all the acer bloat on XP home, it was horrendous. Clean install of S2K8, runs smooth and idles @ 480MB of RAM used. My Nissan Datascan utility consumes another 60mb of RAM when running. I was going to toss 7 on it....but wanted to try this first. Glad I did. Kinda funny....server on a netbook...but with only the bare essentials running and a little tweaking, yea..... Not bad at all.

[Compgeke]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

While not 2008, I have been using this all weekend. The ram usage while idling is quite nice.



Don't be fooled though by the processor as this thing is, infact, a Dell Inspiron with stock motherboard. I swapped the Athlon 2650e or whatever was stock with an Opteron out of a Sunfire X2100 with a bad motherboard.

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^
No tiles?@! I guess the tiles can be turned off.....

I bought one of those heavy duty aftermarket batteries for my netbook, has a 7 hour batt life, which is nice for automotive uses....can datalog for hours and not have to worry about the batt dying, and I have power options disabled. I just got back from an hour long test run in a Z. No issues. The NDS software would usually crash after 30 mins or so on XP home. That issue seems to be gone.

[Per Hansson]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^
No tiles?@! I guess the tiles can be turned off.....

No, the tiles can't be "turned off"
But there is still desktop mode in Win8
Which has a special love for throwing you back into "tiles land" when you click the wrong thing.

[RJARRRPCGP]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^
No tiles?@! I guess the tiles can be turned off.....

I can tell that it's not the 2013 refresh version, because it don't have the new start menu (Which is the new Windows logo on the bottom left of the task bar.) Windows Server 2012 R2 is in sync with 8.1. This one is in sync with the 2012 Windows 8.

The 2013 refresh (The client version is known as 8.1) should have an option to boot right to the desktop.

Looks like the 2013 refresh RTM'ed in August, 2013.

Warning, if you left-click the new start button, you will be thrown back into tiles land!!
The new start menu is right-click...

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^

I just dont get why they would force something so horrendous on the IT guys.....I mean seriously, a 'tiles' server?! Tablets aren't servers and won't be any time soon.... After puttering with 8 all of s sudden, Vista isn't so bad, 7 is king, and server 2008 seems to be the holy grail for a workstation!

[goontron]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

^

I just dont get why they would force something so horrendous on the IT guys.....I mean seriously, a 'tiles' server?! Tablets aren't servers and won't be any time soon.... After puttering with 8 all of s sudden, Vista isn't so bad, 7 is king, and server 2008 seems to be the holy grail for a workstation!

a server with a desktop? what a wast of resources! and then tiles to top it off? what a joke! then M$ wonders why most servers use *nix..... /mini rant

[Elysarian]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

a server with a desktop? what a wast of resources! and then tiles to top it off? what a joke! then M$ wonders why most servers use *nix..... /mini rant

actually, the default installation of server 2012 doesn't have a desktop (or "tiles"), it's optional.

MS are trying to get people to use powershell for server admin tasks.

oh and you have the tiles/desktop thing backwards there, both are seperate applications that run side by side (if you don't launch the desktop it won't use any resources).

[Compgeke]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

Yeah, the computer only has Server 2012 right now instead of R2 but that's because I can't be bothered to update when it runs headless 98% of the time anyways. The only purpose it surves is WDS to install Vista-8.1 (or probably any WIM based Windows, probably even Longhorn).

I do still have tiles galore on the start menu but the most interaction I have with the system most of the time is just push the power button to turn it on and push again to turn it off when I'm done anyways, don't ever see it.

[goontron]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

oh and you have the tiles/desktop thing backwards there, both are seperate applications that run side by side (if you don't launch the desktop it won't use any resources).

Ok: a server with a GUI? What a wast of resources!
Better?

[Topcat]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

Ok: a server with a GUI? What a wast of resources!
Better?

I wouldn't say that.....typing commands is so......80's....

[ratdude747]

Re: Server 2008 Standard as a Workstation

I wouldn't say that.....typing commands is so......80's....

Yes and no. It also gives better control at the expense of productivity (sometimes).