This post is to address my ongoing love affair with Windows Server 2008, which is in RC1.
Those of you who have been following my travesties with Windows Vista will undoubtedly know through my numerous posts to this blog, my pain and suffering under that particular operating system. Not so with Server 2008.
Last month, after Christmas, I took the plunge because of the anticipation of working or writing some code in the near future. Normally I’d never install a pre-release operating system on my main computing platform (my faithful, trusty Dell Inspiron (Gen 1)) which is now running with 2 GB of RAM (in a bid to make Vista work better).
This operating system rocks. It’s got all the advantages of Vista and practically none of the "bad taste in your mouth" aftertaste. Simply, the beauty of on-demand features (services and functionality you patently don’t need are not automatically installed for you) is enough to win me over, off the bat. It performs like a server platform/product should – meaning, fast – and there is little CPU or memory wasted on non-essential processes. This thing is built to perform.
I’ve been using it full time for the past two weeks, running Visual Studio 2008 Team Suite, SQL Server 2005 and various other usual suspects (Office 2007, Project and Visio) and each feature is acting perfectly civil. In addition to those products, I installed IIS 7.0, BITS, Flash, Silverlight, WMP and a few other bits and things and the OS performs fine. This is everything Vista should have been 🙂 Fine, it’s not Vista pretty (no Aero here) but I have proper ATI drivers and all the devices work (was a bit tricky to get wireless working though).
As you can tell, I could go on and on about the new edition of Windows Server. I’ll save some for a more detailed review shortly (with screen grabs).
Have you ever installed a pre-release OS and survived?
