Windows 2008 Server

I freed up an old mainboard and installed Windows 2008 Server this weekend. I joined it into my home domain, enabled Aero on it, installed Office and Visual Studio 2008.

I was, however, a little surprised with various incompatibilities. Skype doesn’t work, neither do Windows Live Messenger or any webcam drivers, DLink wireless, Cisco VPN, and Symantec AV 10. Sure, it’s a server OS, but anyone who’s done M$ web development work knows that Vista/XP’s IIS light just sucks. Plus, if it’s just a server, why can I enable Aero?

More annoyances: The start bar resets itself to the same height with every restart and the latest FireFox claims it was shut down incorrectly every time you open it. None of my USB compact flash readers work.

On the other hand, I also re-imaged my home server with Centos 5.1, and I must admit, I ran into even stranger problems, such as not having a mouse cursor and other strange behavior mostly due to the nvidia drivers. The last functional user interface was and is the Un*x shell.

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