Windows Server 2008
 

This is mostly a review, if you want hard info, just hit up the Wikipedia article.

Out of sheer curiosity I downloaded this yesterday and installed it, being skeptical with my experiences with Windows Vista it came as a great surprise to me how lean and fast Server 2008 is. It seems Microsoft takes more time to cater to businesses and IT pros than home users (big surprise :p).

There are a great number of problems, WMP and any themes beyond Windows Classic are disabled by default (if that's a con), anytime I launch a game it asks for the "gameux.dll", which doesn't prevent the game from running, though it does annoy me. Mostly if you muck around with it, you can treat this as "Windows Workstation 2008" which is a much better for power users than "Vista Business" or Ultimate.

While Vista x86/x64 clogged my machine and glutted it to no end, this has to be the most minimalist I've had Windows since I ran Windows 2000 on a Pentium 200MHz.

I suggest anyone upset with Vista, but still liking the newer features give 2008 a spin, it isn't loaded with shit (like HDCP :)) or Aero so it feels faster than XP on a reasonably new machine. There are no cracks for it (yet), you get a 60 day trial which you can extend for 4 times for a total of 240 days of freeloading.

EDIT: A little word of warning: if you want to fix the gameux.dll problem, DO NOT type "regsvr32 C:\Windows\System32\gameux.dll" with the 64Bit version of Server 2008, it'll fuck up your system badly whenever you launch a game. Originally the solution for the gameux.dll error could be fixed by typing "regsvr32 gameux.dll", but this only pertains to the 32bit distribution of Server 2008.

When that gave me an error (there is a 64bit version of the gameux.dll in the default 64bit system folder regsvr32 points to when you type it without a path), I had the genius idea of typing in the full path to the 32bit version; that was a BAD IDEA to say the least. About 4000 processes of regsvr32.exe were opened bring my system to it's knees. I thought a restart would fix things up, it did until I launched a game, upon which about 4000 processes under rundll32.exe opened, it took 15minutes for the mess to clear up, yes the error message was gone, but this was a pain.

Any fixes you find online that don't specify the 64bit version should be avoided unless it's proven safe.

Thanks for the review. I guess I will try to get my hands on a copy of this through work to try it out. Looking at some of the features, like the read-only DC, it seems pretty interesting.

It's also worth noting if driver compatibility is a worry of yours, you should be fine.

I used Windows Vista x64 drivers and in every case they worked perfectly. I'm also assuming the 32bit version works the same; so if it works on Vista, it should work here (hardware I mean, software is another story).

Has no one else on here given Server 2008 a go? I'm going to in a week or so after all my parts arrive from Black Friday shopping, so I guess I'll post then...

At my work, we are upgrading to Server 2008 next week. I am excited to finally get my hands all over it! New Dell servers, and now Server 2008 life is good right now :)

Whoops forgot to post. x64 working fine here, only a few problems:

-Some software is SPECIFICALLY coded to lock out server OS's, which is stupid since it's the same as Vista really (WMP plugin for Firefox)
-Gaming is working fine, Catalyst 8.12 fails all across the board so those troubles weren't caused specifically by Server 2008

Definitely going better than my old Vista x64 and x64 SP1, though maybe the upgrade from 2gb of RAM to 8gb of RAM and Athlon X2 4800+ to E8400 is responsible...