Well, just like a lot of other people, I’m now using Windows Server 2008 as a desktop OS. I’ve installed it, and I’ve had absolutely no problems whatsoever.
Windows Vista (32bit) and Server 2008 (64bit) dual booting. I’m really impressed with the performance that Server 2008 is giving me. I was expecting to have some issues as I’m using an Acer Travelmate 2008 and I wasn’t expecting 64bit drivers to be available for the hardware, but most of them are available.
There are a couple of bits of hardware that don’t have drivers : the smartcard feature, which doesn’t get used anyway, and some other thing that doesn’t get detected. Everything else works just fine, and is substantially quicker and smoother than Vista was.
Microsoft Virtual PC warns you about using an unsupported host OS, but still works just fine. Aside from this (and the fact that BlogJet only works if you disable DEP for it) the applications seem to work really well.
Regarding the 64bit applications, I’m surprised that there are so many applications running as 32bit. This includes all the Office applications, Acrobat Reader and a number of other bits.
Here’s a few related links that I found helpful in getting this up and running.
As an idea of the improvement, with nothing running on the OS, and the same services disabled for performance reasons, memory used in Vista is sitting at around 950mb, Server 2008 is sitting around the 800mb mark.
Related Links
http://h0bbel.p0ggel.org/windows-server-2008-as-desktop-laptop-os
http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1218
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