| Archive for Downsizer For an ethical approach to consumption |
| vegplot |
Windows 2008 as a desktopIntrigued by claims that runninh Windows 2008 Server as a desktop is faster than Vista I decided to 'upgrade' my desktop to Win Server 2008. I purchased a new hard drive from Dabs which arrived this morning, unpluuged the Vista drive and installed Server 2008 Standard on the new drive and hear I am. I didn't want to configure my system as a dual boot as I didn't want to risk losing existing work and configuration but I'm told it can be done.The install process was painless and very quick and performance does appear to be somewhat faster than Vista but it's early days yet. Server 2008 is a server platform and therefore security is paramount. Most features you'd normally use are disabled or not installed so getting the system to run as a desktop requires some manual tweaking. I used this online guide to help me. http://win2k8.msfn.org/desktop.htm Initail impressions are very good but it's not for the home user. For a start the licence fees are much higher than Vista. Fortunately, we have a Action Pack subscription which for £199 per annum provides us with 10 licences for most of MS's offerings including 2 licences for Server 2008 Standard. I think the retail for Server 2008 is around $490. The acid test begins... |
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| vegplot |
I'm very impressed so far. Speed is good security is great it deos almost everything Vista does and I get to play with IIS7 proper on the same machine as I develop on. It's taken about 2 hours to install everything I had on Vista and copy over all my file via a USB drive. No issues at with install, no errors or warnings or any unexcepted problems. Very smooth. | ||||
| tahir |
How much is 2008server base? | ||||
| orangepippin |
Thanks for the update, I am very tempted to try this! Does it have the aero user interface ... I assume not, and perhaps that is the reason for the speed improvement?
Tahir: you can get prices for various server configurations on www.dabs.com - just enter "windows 2008" in the search box. It seems a lot less than I expected. |
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| orangepippin |
There is also some good information on this website:
http://www.win2008workstation.com/wordpress/ |
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| vegplot |
After a 3 weeks or so of using Win 2008 Server as a desktop I'm happy to say it appears to be quite a lot faster, certainly more responsive than Vista on the same machine. I'm sticking with it, aside from no sleep functionality it has everything I need and more. | ||||
| orangepippin |
Finally got around to doing the same, like you I bought a new drive to avoid any risk to my existing system. Had quite a few problems initially, traced back to old disk and video drivers - but now running very nicely. Apparently MS actually support Open Suse Linux as a virtual OS under Windows 2008, so might give that a go too. | ||||
| vegplot |
I've not tried any virtualisation yet. Sounds like it could be interesting. | ||||
| orangepippin |
I already have XP and Win 2003 running under Hyper-V, which seems like a really excellent bit of technology, and extremely useful for trying things out etc. The acid test will be getting Linux to work though. | ||||
| vegplot |
You must be running 64-bit. I'm only on 32-bit 
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| Barefoot Andrew |
Luddite  
A. |
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| vegplot |
I'm trying to downsize my operations and reduce my impact on the environment as far as I can. Tell me about your new PC. |
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| Maxwell Smart |
You can also strip Vista down to run without a lot of the fancy features which improves performance a lot... |