With XP going EOL next month, I decided it was time to move on (sadly).....but it's time. I remember when Win2k went EOL, it became a malware disaster for any system that had live IP's it seemed. I still have a couple XP systems going, but all my mainstream systems have said goodbye to it.....so what to replace it with?! HMMMM....
Ok, lets review....and think back for a minute. NT had server and workstation editions, so I always ran 'workstation' on the workstations. Windows 2000 had server versions and 'professional', which was their workstation versions.......and were truly the last of the greats for workstation-based OS's. Then came XP and server 2003. Server 2003 was radically improved over Win2k Server, and XP was a freight train, but there was still the separation between the two, the introduction of activation, and also began the drastic 'dumbing down' on the consumer level (winXP). Windows Vista and 7 are dumbed down even more, and also more invasive. Win8/8.1, no way, no how, will never use it, EVER!!!
So what about server 2008? It's out there in no-mans land it seems....and I recently scored a VLK copy of 2008 R1 and R2 (not really much difference between them). It is also very 'hot-roddable', all the eye-candy and dumbed down nonsense is missing, its clean/simple.....by default, everything is OFF until you turn it on. I've spent a week tweaking on it, and I'm now sold. sitting idle, it uses 700mb RAM, which is actually less than XP did on my main system. It's a little trickier to get things to work than say 7, vista, or even XP....but it felt nice to stay completely in the drivers seat with my system....and you all know me anyway, I have to be different, I will never conform to what 'everyone else' is using!
It's well supported in hardware and programs and will be supported by MS till 2020....the only casualty of this was my 15yr old scanner, I could not find a working driver for it ANYWHERE!!! bastards! It is completely unsupported by anything newer than XP.
This thread is more of an FYI and a written reference for anyone (or even myself) later on. In the process of tweaking it, I discovered I certainly wasn't the first to try this....some dude created a site with a nice list of tweaks and fixes. I had the gameux.dll issue, and found the solution here......
http://www.win2008workstation.com/
That's all for now.
Ok, lets review....and think back for a minute. NT had server and workstation editions, so I always ran 'workstation' on the workstations. Windows 2000 had server versions and 'professional', which was their workstation versions.......and were truly the last of the greats for workstation-based OS's. Then came XP and server 2003. Server 2003 was radically improved over Win2k Server, and XP was a freight train, but there was still the separation between the two, the introduction of activation, and also began the drastic 'dumbing down' on the consumer level (winXP). Windows Vista and 7 are dumbed down even more, and also more invasive. Win8/8.1, no way, no how, will never use it, EVER!!!
So what about server 2008? It's out there in no-mans land it seems....and I recently scored a VLK copy of 2008 R1 and R2 (not really much difference between them). It is also very 'hot-roddable', all the eye-candy and dumbed down nonsense is missing, its clean/simple.....by default, everything is OFF until you turn it on. I've spent a week tweaking on it, and I'm now sold. sitting idle, it uses 700mb RAM, which is actually less than XP did on my main system. It's a little trickier to get things to work than say 7, vista, or even XP....but it felt nice to stay completely in the drivers seat with my system....and you all know me anyway, I have to be different, I will never conform to what 'everyone else' is using!
It's well supported in hardware and programs and will be supported by MS till 2020....the only casualty of this was my 15yr old scanner, I could not find a working driver for it ANYWHERE!!! bastards! It is completely unsupported by anything newer than XP.This thread is more of an FYI and a written reference for anyone (or even myself) later on. In the process of tweaking it, I discovered I certainly wasn't the first to try this....some dude created a site with a nice list of tweaks and fixes. I had the gameux.dll issue, and found the solution here......
http://www.win2008workstation.com/
That's all for now.
...thats the reason why I didn't touch it....ick. Why in the name of hideous would MS do that tiles crap on a Server OS?! 
...but yea, only the essentials are running on server editions....no frills, no eye candy, and a clean running kernel. 
- I have 16GB on my win8.1 rig (I did have a play with 2k8r2 for desktop use but decided the licence was better off being used to run SQL server 2012 on another box, my webserver box only has 2k3 on there because it's got a pair of 32-bit s604 Xeons in it).
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